Book 1 – THE SOLAR WAR

John French

Book 2 - THE LOST AND THE DAMNED

Guy Haley

Book 3 - THE FIRST WALL

Gav Thorpe

Book 4 - SATURNINE

Dan Abnett

Book 5 - MORTIS

John French

Book 6 - WARHAWK

Chris Wraight

SONS OF THE SELENAR (Novella)

Graham McNeill

FURY OF MAGNUS (Novella)

Graham McNeill

Book 1 – HORUS RISING

Dan Abnett

Book 2 – FALSE GODS

Graham McNeill

Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES

Ben Counter

Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

James Swallow

Book 5 – FULGRIM

Graham McNeill

Book 6 – DESCENT OF ANGELS

Mitchel Scanlon

Book 7 – LEGION

Dan Abnett

Book 8 – BATTLE FOR THE ABYSS

Ben Counter

Book 9 – MECHANICUM

Graham McNeill

Book 10 – TALES OF HERESY

edited by Nick Kyme and Lindsey Priestley

Book 11 – FALLEN ANGELS

Mike Lee

Book 12 – A THOUSAND SONS

Graham McNeill

Book 13 – NEMESIS

James Swallow

Book 14 – THE FIRST HERETIC

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Book 15 – PROSPERO BURNS

Dan Abnett

Book 16 – AGE OF DARKNESS

edited by Christian Dunn

Book 17 – THE OUTCAST DEAD

Graham McNeill

Book 18 – DELIVERANCE LOST

Gav Thorpe

Book 19 – KNOW NO FEAR

Dan Abnett

Book 20 – THE PRIMARCHS

edited by Christian Dunn

Book 21 – FEAR TO TREAD

James Swallow

Book 22 – SHADOWS OF TREACHERY

edited by Christian Dunn and Nick Kyme

Book 23 – ANGEL EXTERMINATUS

Graham McNeill

Book 24 – BETRAYER

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Book 25 – MARK OF CALTH

edited by Laurie Goulding

Book 26 – VULKAN LIVES

Nick Kyme

Book 27 – THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE

Dan Abnett

Book 28 – SCARS

Chris Wraight

Book 29 – VENGEFUL SPIRIT

Graham McNeill

Book 30 – THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS

Daved Annandale

Book 31 – LEGACIES OF BETRAYAL

edited by Laurie Goulding

Book 32 – DEATHFIRE

Nick Kyme

Book 33 – WAR WITHOUT END

edited by Laurie Goulding

Book 34 – PHAROS

Guy Haley

Book 35 – EYE OF TERRA

edited by Laurie Goulding

Book 36 – THE PATH OF HEAVEN

Chris Wraight

Book 37 – THE SILENT WAR

edited by Laurie Goulding

Book 38 – ANGELS OF CALIBAN

Gav Thorpe

Book 39 – PRAETORIAN OF DORN

John French

Book 40 – CORAX

Gav Thorpe

Book 41 – THE MASTER OF MANKIND

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Book 42 – GARRO

James Swallow

Book 43 – SHATTERED LEGIONS

edited by Laurie Goulding

Book 44 – THE CRIMSON KING

Graham McNeill

Book 45 – TALLARN

John French

Book 46 – RUINSTORM

David Annandale

Book 47 – OLD EARTH

Nick Kyme

Book 48 – THE BURDEN OF LOYALTY

edited by Laurie Goulding

Book 49 – WOLFSBANE

Guy Haley

Book 50 – BORN OF FLAME

Nick Kyme

Book 51 – SLAVES TO DARKNESS

John French

Book 52 – HERALDS OF THE SIEGE

edited by Nick Kyme and Laurie Goulding

Book 53 – TITANDEATH

Guy Haley

Book 54 – THE BURIED DAGGER

James Swallow

Other Novels and Novellas

PROMETHEAN SUN

Nick Kyme

AURELIAN

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM

Chris Wraight

THE CRIMSON FIST

JohnFrench

CORAX: SOULFORGE

Gav Thorpe

PRINCE OF CROWS

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

TALLARN: EXECUTIONER

John French

SCORCHED EARTH

Nick Kyme

THE PURGE

Anthony Reynolds

THE HONOURED

Rob Sanders

THE UNBURDENED

David Annandale

TALLARN: IRONCLAD

John French

RAVENLORD

Gav Thorpe

THE SEVENTH SERPENT

Graham McNeill

WOLF KING

Chris Wraight

CYBERNETICA

Rob Sanders

SONS OF THE FORGE

Nick Kyme

Also available

MACRAGGE’S HONOUR
Dan Abnett and Neil Roberts

Audio Dramas

THE DARK KING / THE LIGHTNING TOWER

Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett

RAVEN’S FLIGHT

Gav Thorpe

GARRO: OATH OF MOMENT

James Swallow

GARRO: LEGION OF ONE

James Swallow

BUTCHER’S NAILS

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

GREY ANGEL

John French

GARRO: BURDEN OF DUTY

James Swallow

GARRO: SWORD OF TRUTH

James Swallow

THE SIGILLITE

Chris Wraight

HONOUR TO THE DEAD

Gav Thorpe

CENSURE

Nick Kyme

WOLF HUNT

Graham McNeill

HUNTER’S MOON

Guy Haley

THIEF OF REVELATIONS

Graham McNeill

TEMPLAR

John French

ECHOES OF RUIN

Various Authors

MASTER OF THE FIRST

Gav Thorpe

THE LONG NIGHT

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

THE EAGLE’S TALON

John French

IRON CORPSES

David Annandale

RAPTOR

Gav Thorpe

GREY TALON

Chris Wraight

THE EITHER

Graham McNeill

THE HEART OF THE PHAROS / CHILDREN OF SICARUS

L J Goulding and Anthony Reynolds

RED-MARKED

Nick Kyme

ECHOES OF REVELATION

Various Authors

THE THIRTEENTH WOLF

Gav Thorpe

VIRTUES OF THE SONS / SINS OF THE FATHER

Andy Smillie

THE BINARY SUCCESSION

David Annandale

DARK COMPLIANCE

John French

BLACKSHIELDS: THE FALSE WAR

Josh Reynolds

BLACKSHIELDS: THE RED FIEF

Josh Reynolds

HUBRIS OF MONARCHIA

Andy Smillie

NIGHTFANE

Nick Kyme

BLACKSHIELDS: THE BROKEN CHAIN

Josh Reynolds

Contents

Cover

Backlist

The Horus Heresy

Cthonia’s Reckoning

Sons of Cthonia

To the Last

The Gangs Beneath

The Flesh Harvest

Traitor’s Faith

For Hate’s Sake

Postulant

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘The Solar War’

A Black Library Publication

THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.

His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.

Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions, are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.

Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.

Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.

The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.

The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended.
The Age of Darkness has begun.

SONS OF CTHONIA

JOHN FRENCH

‘Who are you to say that I may not sit at this hearth? Am I not as you? Did we not once break bread, laugh, bleed and weep together? Am I not the one who set off into the world at your side till paths and time set our steps towards different suns? Am I not returned to this place called home, weary with time and the weight of the sword? Is the only rest you would give me that of the bed of knives? Shall we not sit and talk and remember that once we were brothers?’

– from the Voice of the Stones, pre-unification Terra,
exact era and author unknown

He woke to darkness and the sound of his old name inside his skull already fading. He could taste the blood in his mouth and throat, clotting to a red slime. The instinct to panic rose for just long enough for him to notice it. Then the psycho-conditioning cut it away and he was calm. His name, his real name, sounded clear in his thoughts. He was Diosus, a warrior-son of Rogal Dorn, brother of the Imperial Fists. He had been in battle. He had been injured. Instinctively he tried to move his hand, but could not. A flash of panic again, but far away, strangled before it could cry out.

There had been sixteen of his brothers: two units, under-strength, force command designated to Sergeant Astoga. The mission parameters and objectives flashed clear in Diosus’ mind: push down and south through the supply tunnel network and into the mined tunnel warrens; identify ambush site, engage XVI Legion force elements, inflict damage then withdraw to prepared emplacements; allow enemy force to increase and then demolish the tunnels to both block advance and inflict maximum casualties. Once complete, withdraw back to Traitor’s Gate. It had not progressed as intended.

The enemy had advanced further forwards and with greater force than expected: mutant-slaves, half-machines, things that wore armour but bounded across the ground like canids. No ambush, no preparation of kill-zones or battle progression, just sudden running warfare. Bolt-rounds smacking into chiselled stone. Grunts and cries and the thunder of explosions rolling through from the throat of the tunnels, deafening, shaking Diosus’ skull inside his helmet. No possibility of holding, just the chance of slowing them for long enough to set the charges.

‘To the glory of Dorn and the Emperor!’ The cry had echoed over the vox in his ears and then from his throat as he fired into the oncoming tide. Then the rolling thunder of demolition charges, then white fire and a deluge of darkness.

He flinched at the recall. It was so bright and vivid that he felt the instinct to blink. The display lit in his helm. Information winked back at him: red icons, numbers, data. For a moment it did not mean anything to him. Then it snapped into focus. His armour was intact but damaged. Atmosphere was breathable. His weapon was no longer in his hand, no longer linked to his armour by gauntlet contact. Debris covered him. He was buried…

Buried. Down in the worm burrows… down in the dark with the breath-thieves and the coin-takers… down where you die if you are not quick enough, if you are weak.

Blink, the display came back into focus. His armour was still powered. It would move. Other fragments of red data pulsed in his eyes. Damage markers. Damage to him. There was no pain. Just the red pulses and indicators on the display.

He had to move. He was alive. That meant that he could fight, could stand with his brothers, could die facing the enemy.

Facing the enemy… not down in the dark where the lost and the eyeless walk, not dying in slowly, slowly fading breaths, no one to put the coins on your eyes after the silence came…

The thoughts were slower to fade that time. He waited. Noticing now the metal taste on his breath. He began to move, testing the weight of the debris, levering, finding give in the blanket of dust and rock and starting to move. It was careful work, an inch-by-inch process, taken one movement at a time until his hands were free, then his head, and then he was kneeling on a tunnel floor at the base of a tumble of broken rock.

His helm gathered what scraps of light there were, but the darkness was almost total and so the world was sketched in grainy green. He looked down at himself. Blood covered his lower torso and left thigh. Dust had mixed with it as it clotted, but it still stuck to his fingers, still wet. There was a split in the armour running across his gut plate, grating as he moved. There was still no pain, just numbness. That would not last. There were corpses on the floor. Pieces of armour. He saw a bolter lying half-buried in debris. Pulled it free, checked it: functioning, magazine half full. He swapped it for a full one from his ammo pouch, made the gun ready, then knelt by the corpse that had been near it. It was face down, the vents of its backpack twisted and half torn off. Carefully, he rolled the heap of broken plates. It sagged as it moved, a collection of crushed flesh and shattered ceramite. The yellow looked black in his green-tinted sight. He saw the dagger-and-shield mark incised on a shard. It was a mark he had seen every time he looked beside him in the battle line: Thasius, raised to the Legion with him, a brother in war and in blood. He bowed his head.

‘Your sacrifice will be remembered,’ he said aloud.

‘None of us will be remembered, son of Cthonia…’ The voice came out of the dark, echoing off the stone walls. Diosus was on his feet, bolter in his hand, head and eyes tracking for a target.

Geldron held still as his own words fled into the dark. He heard the scrape of a heavy boot on rock, the low clatter of shifting stone shards. The son of Dorn was close… perhaps. It was difficult to tell precise direction and distance in these tunnels. You could hear the dead breathing down here, they said, could feel their chuckles on the hot air, but the warrens played their tricks. The Writhing Gods had made the tunnels as a place to flee, that was the story he had learned when he had been a boy running through them with a knife in his hand. The Writhing Gods had made them and turned them into a web to catch their prey: no way to escape sounds stolen from one place and sent to echo in another, holes opening in the floor that plunged down into the mouths waiting far below. All sounds were ghosts in the dark. You could feel the inferno heat rising up from the depths, smell the rank breath of the things that hungered and waited for you. Old stories, long left behind. He had never thought he would come back, never thought he would be waiting for a shift of air or a sound to tell him which way an enemy was. He had never thought he would come home.

He had lowered the power going to his armour systems, nudged down the heat exchanger so that its buzzing was just a low purr. Sweat was starting to prickle his skin, beads running down his forehead. There was a light ahead, red and orange, a fire glow from where some slumbering tectonic force had heaved itself through the rock floor. It ran right across the tunnel path. Beyond it the darkness shifted, mottled and deepened by contrast with the low light. There could be a figure there, crouched at the edge of sight. He ran his tongue across his teeth, thinking. He needed to get closer. That was the way to kill in these tunnels. Get close, rip an enemy’s limbs from under them, then go into them, fast, remorseless, all aggression until you could take their last breath: that was the Cthonian way.

‘You were born here, weren’t you?’ he asked, speaking the words aloud so that they bounced and sheared from the stone. No reply, no sound, not even the chink of stone. He began to move towards the shadow figure. ‘I was, too, a long time ago. Most of the newborn of my Legion have never seen Cthonia or been here. Not like you and your brothers…’

A little closer, and he was almost sure that it was a figure in the dark. He had to be sure, had to be closer. That was a rule to stay alive by: never move to kill until you are certain you have your mark cold.

‘You have never left this world, have you?’ he called, letting the noise roll and shift as he moved, swallowing the sound of his armour. ‘Taken, selected, then made into a Legion warrior and sent to fight over the ground that gave birth to you. Cthonia is all you have known. The universe likes to jest. The new breed of my Legion daub themselves in names and trinkets, and chew out bits of gang tongue that they don’t understand, all to be true Sons of Horus, all to ape the ways that we both were born to…’ He laughed. The dark folded the noise back to him, breaking it so that it sounded like a chorus laughing from somewhere he could not see. ‘And then there is you. You have been made a warrior, but you have shed all that my newly bred brothers would want. No mirror coins for you when you die, no topknot to show you are a bond warrior, no kill tally on your armour and skin. Yellow armour, honour and strength, cast in stone like Rogal Dorn himself…’

Geldron stopped. He could see a warrior in battleplate in the tunnel ahead, the yellow of the Imperial Fists dusted dull and draped in the tunnel dark, shaded by the orange seeping from cracks in the floor. The warrior was injured, Geldron could tell, a wound to the left thigh and gut. That would be slowing him, making his reactions slower. That was good. He had him cold and clear. He just needed to set the shot – he would do it the old way: rip the legs apart, then the upper limbs, then execute.

‘What is your name?’ he called.

The question echoed down the tunnel, seeming to come from every direction as it crashed off the stone. Diosus stopped. The icons in his helm were unresolved amber over fizzing black and green. He could almost tell which direction the voice had come from. Almost. The fading sound of the question was flat in the stillness of his helm. Carefully he reached up and unfastened the helm’s catches. The data vanished from his eyes. He pulled the helm off, clamped it to his belt. The smell of rock dust and ash filled the first breath he took. He closed his eyes, let the air of the tunnel settle onto his bare skin. There was no thread of breeze to carry sound or scent. The tunnel around him branched to either side. This part was old, made with plasma torches by whoever had first bored down into this part of Cthonia. The pulse of the old core of the world ached in the air here.

Diosus felt the hesitation in his mind. He was an Imperial Fist. He had survived where many others had not. His mind had absorbed the lessons and knowledge injected into him by neuro-infusion and hypno-indoctrination. His body had accepted the gene-seed planted in it and had adapted fast enough to live through the accelerated creation process. Many had not. He knew that it was a process that normally took twice or three times as long, and there was a cost to the speed with which he and his brothers had achieved ascension. Abridgments in processes, sliced recovery times, doses of growth and neuro-enhancing drugs pushed past safety thresholds. The Legion had done their best, selecting candidates for physical hardiness and mental fortitude above all else, but the war for the Cthonia – for the Imperium – needed warriors and could not afford patience.

Candidates died in the first implantation phases, more as the psycho-processes kicked in. Total identity collapse, cerebral haemorrhages, neural-system shutdown – the wastage rate was higher than for implant rejection or physical training. Diosus had survived, but it had taken its due from him. Much of his memory was gone, or seemed so until it surfaced at random intervals, as though his new self was a layer bolted over the top of old structures. Like the rest of his brothers, he had taken a new name once he had ascended. Part of it was becoming part of the VII Legion, shedding the person who he had been before and the marred legacy of Cthonia with it. Part of it was because they needed to replace what had been taken.

‘Diosus,’ he said.

‘Diosus?’ His name came back as a question, as though the echoes did not believe him. ‘Not a name that came out of these warrens. When I asked your name, I meant the name that this place gave you.’

The words bounced and danced through the dark. Diosus blinked. He could not place where the sound was coming from. Except… there was something else, another sound hiding under the fading echoes, the dulled metallic purr of armour…

He threw himself aside as bolt-shells exploded across the tunnel floor. Shards of rock pinged off his armour. The sound rolled and rolled, battering into him as he came up to a kneeling crouch and fired back. He didn’t have a clean target, but he had seen the flash of the muzzle. The roar of his own gun melded with that of his enemy’s fire. He shifted position as the bolt-shells kicked from the barrel of his gun. Saw a figure in power armour duck back, fired another bolt, saw it splash against a sea-green pauldron and burst against the wall. The other warrior spun back. The round counter on the bolter blinked red. Diosus had the magazine out and another loaded, but the target had gone. There was nothing, just the dark rolling back in to swallow the flames of the explosions.

He held still, and then the old, pre-induction instincts kicked in. He moved, pulling back into the shadow edge of the tunnel and began to work his way along the wall. Luminous veins of mineral, too thin to be mined out, diluted the shadows with pale light. The moment after surviving an attack was always the most dangerous: senses relaxed, guard lowered. You could kill someone quickly in those moments. He would not let himself die, though.

‘This is a death web. No way out for the living without paying a death price,’ he called out.

‘So…’ Geldron smiled. ‘You do remember the Cthonian ways.’

‘You will die down here, traitor. I will take the breath from your throat.’

‘A kind offer,’ said Geldron. He had pulled into another tunnel, wider this time, almost pitch-black. His bolter was drained of rounds, his pouches empty. He drew his knife. ‘But I do not intend to be your blood price to the dark.’

He paused as he rounded a corner. There was light ahead, a pillar of dirty light falling down a shaft from the world above. He could see the ghost outlines of machinery, gantries bolted to the walls, the slumped mass of a drill unit, its nose still embedded in the rock. Its wires and systems had been ripped out, its corpse picked clean of anything valuable. Rust had begun to eat what remained. He moved next to the light. The shaft it came from was narrow, barely wide enough for a human to get their head into. An old ventilation shaft, he thought, bringing the less polluted air down into the underworld of the mine warrens so that the miners could breathe. That had been a long time ago, before Horus, before the Emperor or any of what would come after. Cthonia had been mined out, cored and left to become its own kind of hell, humanity scrabbling for survival and the last scraps of meat still left on the carcass. When the Great Crusade had arrived, the only thing of value to take from the mine warrens were the gang-clans to feed its hunger for recruits and the lessons of violence they could teach to the Emperor’s warriors.

‘What clan were you?’ Geldron called, hefting his bolter and moving again.

Diosus tilted his head. The voice was closer than he had expected. Even with the tunnels making phantoms from the sound, he was certain the enemy was near.

‘I am of the Imperial Fists,’ he called in response, moving as the echoes spoke to hide the sound of his armour and steps. ‘That is my only clan.’

The reply was laughter fading to an echoing chuckle. ‘I was of the Truth Keepers. We and the Iron Teeth, the Eyeless, were the names to fear when I was here. All gone now, eaten by time and that’s no shame. These tunnels are not kind and they don’t make kind sons.’

Diosus could see the light of an old ventilation shaft ahead. Half-collapsed gantries ran along the wall, a dead drill unit still embedded in the rock. He slowed. He recognised this place. Back beyond the flow of hypno-implanted knowledge he could see a fragment of memory, of crouching on a gantry, blade in hand, gang-kin beside him, watching figures move along the tunnel where he now stood. He went to the remains of the drill unit and ran his hand along its flank until he found the gang glyphs scratched into the metal. Other memories bubbled into focus, places he had moved through when he had been a human. His mind was turning over.

‘Do you know why we did it?’ came the voice of the enemy. ‘Do you know why we rose against the Emperor?’

Geldron had stopped. He had come back on a junction of tunnel openings splaying off in different directions. He was not lost. He could not get lost now. His memory functioned like a store of perfect images and his sense of direction was unerring, both gifts of the Emperor’s gene craft. Added to this was his instinct for the warrens that had been his cradle, meaning that he was very sure that he was not lost. He had not found the Imperial Fist, though – somehow the newborn had melted into nothing.

He waited for Diosus to reply, letting seconds flick by before speaking again.

‘We rose up against the Emperor because He betrayed us.’

‘You are the traitors,’ came an answer. ‘Your reasons do not matter.’

He turned his head, following the sound. He had him. He began to run.

‘We made His Imperium for Him,’ said Geldron. He could feel the anger in the words now, pushing them out of his throat. ‘We bled and lost and left behind our humanity for it. We are the reason that He is Emperor, and not just another warlord like the ones who died in these tunnels. The reward for this? To be cast out, to be set aside when we had done His bloody deeds.’

‘That is a lie.’ Diosus heard his denial shiver from the walls around him. He had reached the place he remembered. He looked around. Daylight came from a fist-wide opening above, adding to the glow of molten rock from a fissure running along the tunnel wall. Dust hung in the air, rolling in the shadows where the daylight and firelight met. His own shadow hung before him, a silhouette suspended like the image of his soul torn from his body.

‘Is it a lie?’ came the voice of the traitor, closing. ‘What are you? You are called Diosus, a name that they gave you, no doubt when they had finished dumping hypno-knowledge and gene-seed into you. Legionaries once took years to make and train. Now they are just produced like so many bullets off a production line – made to be spent. If you think I am lying, look at yourself and where we are – you were not made to survive this war.’

‘I was made to protect the Imperium,’ Diosus replied.

‘The Imperium!’ Geldron laughed. He had his knife in his hand. ‘We are the Imperium! Without us there is nothing. We rose up against the lie.’ He could see light ahead, daylight from above, magma glow from below, and with it a shape in the gloom. A shadow in the tunnel before him. He was running now. He would end this with a blade, razor-edged, rushing from the dark. ‘You would not see it that way because you are made to be blind to the truth, but in this war we, the Sons of Horus, are the wronged and the righteous.’

Geldron lunged from the dark. The blade in his fist ready to stab up, to punch into the wound in the Imperial Fist’s side, to plunge deep, to sever and drive inwards as Geldron rammed the other warrior off his feet and sent him down to the ground, to stab and hack and smash, a bloody tumble until there was just a torn mass and him standing above it, breathing hard, his killing done.

Except that his enemy was not there. Dust coiled around Geldron, catching light and shadow, forming spectres in the air. He felt the sound of his own armour and breath rebound off the spurs of rock, felt himself blink with shock.

Bolt-rounds struck him in the legs from the side, blowing him back, armour cracking, smashing through the ceramite with bone-snapping force. He was down, tumbling, the world shattering into white and black splinters of pain.

Diosus stepped from the dark, coming forwards, firing again, drilling rounds into Geldron’s legs, chewing them with shrapnel and explosions. He stripped the magazine from the gun, dropping the empty while reloading. Geldron scrambled backwards, dragging the chunks of his leg by ribbons of sinew. He still had his knife in his right hand. He braced, arched to throw it. Diosus aimed the bolter and fired. The burst blew through Geldron’s hand. The remains of the knife pinged off the wall. Another explosion of pain. Blood scattering, black in the orange light bleeding from the floor. Diosus kept coming forwards, unhurried, remorseless, gun levelled. Geldron could see the blood on the warrior’s face, the cold stone eyes. Cthonian, Cthonian down to the blood. Diosus was there above him, and Geldron knew that the next burst of fire would rip his head from his body and then saw down into his chest, obliterating, blood spraying up to mark the yellow armour that looks black… The old way, the way of killing that said an enemy was beneath gang honour, beneath the gift of coins placed on the eyes to mirror the dark, a traitor’s death.

Geldron grinned up with bloody teeth at the gun barrel. Diosus’ finger began to squeeze the trigger. Geldron brought a knife up from where he had shielded it with his body.

Diosus saw the flash of a razor edge and fired as the blade punched into his knee and ripped out the back of the joint. He fell, shots blazing wide, splintering stone.

Always beware the blade you can’t see… he thought to himself. The difference between being alive and quick, or quick and dead. He hadn’t seen it though, and Geldron was on him, pulling him down, pinning his bolter to him, blood scattering as the Son of Horus forced the point of his knife up towards Diosus’ jaw. Diosus had a second, a moment long enough to see the path that he had taken to this point, but not long enough to draw a breath.

He saw himself running through these tunnels. He saw the faces of his brothers, clad in yellow, marked by the fist that meant that they would die but they would never break, brothers in blood and war. He was always going to die, the blood of his enemy on his hands, and the last air in his lungs breathed to the silence that waits where there is no light. That moment had come, last breath already drawn, last deeds done. It might have been different. It might have ended sooner, ended for the pride of clans and chieftains who no one would remember, as a fool in a traitor’s war.

He knew that all the bio-alchemy dumped into him, all the hypno-conditioning and lessons of Legion history and tenets of honour did not matter, not now, not really. All that mattered was that he would end as a warrior of the Imperial Fists, a bloody and defiant son of Rogal Dorn and of Cthonia.

He gave a last surge of effort, tried to twist free, tried to bring his own weapon up. The last thing he felt was the point of the knife under his chin.

Geldron slumped back, pulling the knife free. All he could smell was the blood now: his, and the dead warrior’s beside him. It was very quiet suddenly. The pain had faded to a numb absence at the edge of his awareness, a sign that too much damage had been done, and his body was now just blotting out what it could not heal. He dropped the knife. The dead warrior was staring up at the ceiling, eyes open but unseeing.

‘There was no way out,’ said Geldron. His voice vanished into the dark in echoes. ‘This is a death web, you said, and you were right. All the tunnels loop back on themselves or are blocked. We were going to die down here one way or another, you and I.’ He paused. His sight was becoming grey, blurring at the edges. All he could taste was copper and iron. ‘You caught the edge first… but you fought well,’ he said, smiled, felt the blood run over his lip. ‘I never thought it would end down here for me. On Terra, maybe, or some other place out there, but not here, with the silence, just bleeding out like all the rest of us that came before… Cthonian before and after anything else in the end.’ He blinked, and found that he could barely open his eyes again, and when he did, everything was running to tattered grey and black at the edge of what he could see. Silence waited there.

With fading strength, he made his hand move to the cord around his neck and pulled it free. The mirror coins were pale in the falling night of his world. He looked at them for a long moment, then took them and slowly, bloody fingers fumbling, placed them over Diosus’ eyes. He slumped back, feeling the waiting dark beneath rise for him at last.

TO THE LAST

MICHAEL F HASPIL

Battle lurked among the callous stars in the void space of exhausted Cthonia.

Captain Rumiko Salakia stood at the lectern extending from the arm of the sella mandatum. The throne dominated the centre of the command dais, but she could not bring herself to remain seated.

The incense and consistent binharic droning from the servitor choir carried an ominous tone, amplifying her nerves. The activity in the strategium continued, as mundane as ever. Servo-skulls and mechanical cherubim swooped among the flying buttresses conveying missives to their respective masters. Junior officers and servitors tended cogitator banks bristling with status runes of every shape and colour.

Her last command had ended in disaster. Kyghon Dachoro, the first officer of the Bringer of Justice, the task force’s battle cruiser, had commanded a mutiny and murdered his captain. Then he’d opened fire on the escorts as a signal to the other traitors in the fleet. In moments, the bulk of the betrayal had borne its deadly fruit.

Rumiko’s critically wounded ship fled, escaping largely due to her enginarium crew, who overcharged the engines and reactors against all measure of caution. Most of them died less than a fortnight later of severe radiation poisoning. They’d trusted her and done their utmost, and though her mind assured her she’d done all she could, her heart whispered of her failure to her crew.

Now, she captained the Ferrum Purgatio, a vessel of considerable size and prowess. The adepts of Mars, themselves eager for vengeance after their recent schism, had refitted the Lunar hull to the Cadmus-class heavy cruiser configuration. The additional weapons and reactor provided firepower unmatched in anything short of a grand cruiser.

The ship’s – her ship’s – machine-spirit thrummed with impatience. As ready to prove itself as she was. Her chance to make things right.

Commander Aletur, her first officer, a walking recruitment poster in his blue-and-white Armada Imperialis uniform, had served with her for nearly two decades now. When she made captain, she’d made sure he could be at her side.

Her second officer, Lieutenant Mirius, moved from station to station, peering at displays over crew members’ shoulders. His hand rubbed absently at his bionic leg.

Dominating the front of the strategium, Cthonia’s orbital plate loomed in the oculus display. A massive floating city-fortress suspended in geo-stationary orbit, it represented a marvel of Imperial engineering.

The Ferrum Purgatio rested at high anchor above it, reinforcing and resupplying the loyalist forces of Lord-Castellan Evander Garrius, who had relocated his command there to better bolster its defences. After Traitor Astartes on the worthless planet below had managed to send a distress call, he’d evacuated his wounded to liberate planetside medicae facilities for expected casualties. The traitors’ relief might never come, or it could be speeding its way through the chaotic empyrean even now.

So, for the last three hours, the Purgatio’s holds and living spaces had been emptying themselves of reserves, troops, and supplies and filling them with recovering members of Imperial Army Solar Auxilia and Cthonian Militia. The Purgatio’s lower decks swelled with convalescing wounded of every rank and occupation.

Rumiko pulled a chrono from her pocket and assessed the time. The chrono – a magnificent clockwork replica with a marbled face – had been in her family for generations. The seven delicate silvered hands sketched out their arcs denoting the passage of time in rarely seen bespoke precision. She could use the data-feed timestamps through her monocular, but she enjoyed the tactile feel of the chrono and the way its analogue indicators spoke to her. She snapped the golden cover shut and placed it back in her pocket.

Yeoman Licci waited respectfully out of view and cleared her throat theatrically. ‘It has been some hours since you ate.’

Licci had the height of the voidborn about her. She held a tray brimming with fine cups of exotic tea atop delicate saucers. Plates of sliced meats and cheeses competed for attention.

Rumiko took a cup but waved away the charcuterie.

Licci gave her a knowing look. ‘Fatigue is the enemy of vigilance. You worry too much, ma’am.’

‘A captain’s duty is to worry. To exercise and examine every hypothetical a thousandfold. Better to suffer in the mind than in the flesh.’

‘From Arnoz Domostal’s Principia?’ Commander Aletur asked.

Rumiko sat in the command throne and retracted the lectern. ‘From Rumiko Salakia’s ever-growing list of dubious aphorisms.’

They shared a laugh.

Rumiko placed the cup’s saucer on the throne’s arm and took a long draught of the warm liquid. She closed her eyes and tried to let some of the tension bleed away. The avalanche of message traffic in the Segmentum Solar made it likely no one had received the traitors’ missive.

A blaring klaxon forced her eyes open.

Violet indicator runes flashed on the command throne and lectern screens. Her monocular data-feed scrolled warnings from the sensors almost too quickly to read.

‘Report all bearings as relative,’ Rumiko ordered as she began to process them.

The Master of Auspex, a modified Martian tech-adept, blared in a mechanical voice, ‘Warp translation indication. Bearing two-four-two mark zero-two-eight. Range two-three-nine decimal two-three-three megametres and closing.’

‘By Terra, that’s close,’ Aletur said. ‘At flank, they’ll be in engagement range in just over an hour. Less if we meet them.’

Rumiko checked her data-feeds and stood, the tension returning to her tenfold.

Her action knocked the saucer from the arm of the command throne. It fell and shattered. Rumiko considered the fine porcelain pieces of the shattered plate against the dark steel floor of the command dais and it struck her as an ill omen.

‘Who are they?’ she voiced aloud, though, as she considered their risky manoeuvre of bypassing the Mandeville point and entering realspace so close to Cthonia’s gravity well, she already knew the answer.

The Master of Auspex mistook her rhetorical question for a command query. ‘Scanned drive signatures indicate vessels last known to belong to the Sons of Horus.’

Traitors.

They had come.

The crew burst into action.

Rumiko commanded, though her people were already in motion. ‘Master of Vox, relay ship-wide. General quarters. Battle stations. Battle stations. Enemy fleet incoming. Strap in and lock to your posts. Harden for high-gravity manoeuvres and possible impacts. This is not a drill.’

The vox-thief built into the command throne made her voice sound rich as it boomed through the cavernous spaces of the ship. The lumen-strips throughout the bridge dimmed and shone red and amber to indicate the change in readiness condition and allow crew members to focus on their data-screens more readily. A shrill alert klaxon sounded three times.

‘Yeoman Licci, please clear this. And get rid of these constructs.’ She indicated the broken plate, hovering servo-skulls, and mechanical cherubs flitting about. Any one of them could become a devastating weapon if the Purgatio suffered gravity or inertial dampening loss for even a second.

‘Master of the Enginarium, bring reactor three to one hundred per cent. Master Gunner, ready all lance batteries. Master of Ordnance, ready macrobatteries and torpedoes. Master of Vox, please relay our readiness status to Admiral Cambaelas. We shall be ready to break orbit in five minutes.’

Commander Aletur interrupted her: ‘Captain, what of the evacuation operations?’

Rumiko pursed her lips in annoyance. They were no longer a priority. The Ferrum Purgatio was a ship of the line, not some menial transport. ‘Master of Vox, contact orbital control and tell them we are ceasing evacuation and resupply operations. Any craft already en route may proceed to their destinations. But let them know once we start moving, that’s it.’

The Master of Vox acknowledged her command with a curt nod and went about his duty.

‘Master of Auspex, how many traitors shall we expect?’ Rumiko asked.

The tech-adept’s mechanical voice grated in her ears. ‘Eight ships of various displacement. Two cruisers and associated escorts.’

Commander Aletur scoffed. ‘That’s all?’

Rumiko gave him a wary glance. ‘I agree. The force seems small.’ Even as she spoke, her monocular overlaid the displacement, crew complements, weapon loadouts, and course, speed and bearings of the incoming ships across her vision.

Across the rest of the bridge, tech-adepts and Armada Imperialis personnel strapped themselves into their duty seats. All save the Master of Helm, who was always secured into the helm throne as a matter of course. The score of mechadendrite cables attached to receptors in her skull and spine bound her to the Purgatio in a grotesque but necessary communion of biology and technology.

Lieutenant Mirius moved from station to station, double-checking the crew positions and ensuring servitor units were secure. He noted a status alert on one of the screens.

‘Master of Helm,’ Rumiko said. ‘Make ready to run up the main engines.’

Lieutenant Mirius nearly shouted, ‘We’ve got a contingent of Astartes coming aboard.’

‘That’s irregular.’ Rumiko crossed the command dais to observe the screen then stepped back to the command throne. ‘All we need–’

‘Incoming transmission from the Praxis Delictum. Admiral Cambaelas,’ the Master of Vox interrupted.

The admiral appeared on the hololithic display in front of the command dais. Rendered in static-filled vortices of interfering light, he seemed larger than life.

‘Captain Salakia, my compliments on readying your vessel with such alacrity. However, I believe you may stand down and continue evacuation and resupply operations as long as is practicable.’

‘I believe we are at that point, admiral,’ Rumiko answered. ‘I mean to break orbit and move on an intercept course within minutes.’

‘You misunderstand me, captain.’ The admiral smiled as he said it. ‘We are more than a match for this rabble. The Ferrum Purgatio and the Sanguinem Victus will assist the Imperial Fists frigate Sword of Truth in providing cover and fire support to Lord-Castellan Garrius’ forces on the orbital plate. This should only be necessary if one of the traitors should slip by us. Which they will not.’

‘Of course, sir,’ Rumiko acknowledged. Inside, she bristled. Doubt nagged at her spirit. Could this be a matter of trust? This was the perfect opportunity to blood the refitted Ferrum Purgatio. She sensed that the ship’s machine-spirit agreed with her. Yet they were to remain in the rearguard. She turned briefly from the hololith display and typed a surreptitious message into the command throne’s data-slate.

If bait to lure from Cthonia? If trap? She sent it to the admiral across a data-link only he would see.

On the hololith, she heard the admiral’s acknowledgement chime as he received her message.

He smiled at her with an avuncular air. ‘Rest assured, if more traitors arrive, it shan’t be many more. They are occupied elsewhere. Besides, we hold with present forces. Were the arch-traitor himself to arrive, it’s not as if we could muster more.’ His lips pressed together in a tight line of determination. ‘You have your orders.’

‘Aye, sir,’ Rumiko said. But the admiral had already disconnected the link from his end.

Over the next few minutes, stations throughout the ship reported readiness status condition one. The admiral might not think they’d be required, but the Ferrum Purgatio stood ready should the need arise.

Commander Aletur moved to her side. ‘Shall I remain here then, in light of our new orders?’

She met his eyes as she considered her options. How would she have behaved before the betrayal? She couldn’t allow herself to second-guess her actions. Doubt killed.

She held her first officer’s gaze for perhaps a moment too long. But not long enough that any of the crew noticed.

‘No, commander. I shall need you at your post in the strategium secundus.’ She lowered her voice, so only he could hear. ‘Despite Admiral Cambaelas’ confidence, I’ll warrant we’ve got a fight coming to us yet. I’ll need you to double-check my calculations and assume command of the ship, should…’

‘Understood, captain.’ He stepped back, saluted, and departed for the secondary bridge, located deep in the heart of the vessel. Next to the Navigator’s blister, it was the least vulnerable section of the Ferrum Purgatio. However, the redundant systems there were hardened to the point of impracticability for standard command. They were more than adequate for the ship’s survival, but lacked the finesse preferred for normal operations.

As Commander Aletur left the strategium, he stepped aside as a massive power-armoured figure crowded its way in. It was one of the Legiones Astartes. The crimson lumens played across dingy and tarnished ceramite painted in the yellow livery of the VII Legion.

Rumiko had seen Space Marines before, standing in parade review. They’d impressed her as paragons of martial prowess. This one looked like he’d come fresh from combat. In places, the chipped colouring on his armour showed the bare plate beneath.

She couldn’t fathom why he was on her bridge.

The Space Marine towered over her. His voice issued forth as a harsh rumble from a damaged vox-emitter. ‘You are this vessel’s shipmistress.’

Not a question. A statement.

‘I am her captain. Yes, my lord. I–’ She saw her relatively diminutive form reflected in his helmet’s unsympathetic emerald eye-lenses.

‘I am Legionary Sergeant Alvas Jaelald of the Four-Fifty-Sixth Reserve Company. Lord Castellan Garrius sent me.’

‘May I enquire as to your purpose, sergeant?’

‘The defences on the orbital plate will not curb an attack. The lord castellan needs additional defence. Your vessel may suffice. As we boarded, we overheard and saw your preparations to leave orbit. We grew… concerned.’

‘You needn’t be. I have my orders. I shall defend the orbital plate to the best of my ability.’

Rumiko held up one finger to the legionary. She turned to the Master of Auspex. ‘Boost power to the augur arrays. Monitor the admiral’s engagement and inform me the instant anything changes.’

She returned her attention to the Space Marine. ‘If I may ask, my lord, how many of your brethren accompany you?’

‘Enough to take this vessel, if necessary.’

There it was. The Legiones Astartes served as a fail-safe. They didn’t trust her or her crew. Sergeant Jaelald merely stated fact. Should he desire it, the legionary could commandeer the vessel even now. Alone. No one in the strategium had the means to stop him.

Despite the torrent of indignity and anger flowing through her, Rumiko smiled, hoping to defuse some of the tension. ‘You misunderstand me, my lord. To make room for the evacuated wounded, we’ve sent many of our forces planetside. We no longer have a full complement of troops aboard. We still have ship’s security, true. But we would be hard-pressed to repel Traitor Astartes. Should battle be joined, the bulk of the fighting may fall to–’

‘I have a squad with me,’ Jaelald answered.

A squad might suffice, it might not. In any case, it would have to do. She felt further questions would annoy the legionary.

‘Very well,’ Rumiko said.

The Master of Auspex’s grating voice announced, ‘Our fleet is engaging. Exchange of long-range lance fire and torpedoes.’

Rumiko’s fingers selected the appropriate runes and fed the incoming auspex data directly to her monocular, which rendered loyal and traitor ships as wireframe models hovering in her field of vision. The next few minutes would be critical.

Legionary Jaelald interrupted her thoughts. ‘You doubt the situation. You worry.’

‘A captain’s duty, sergeant.’

‘The admiral is more than capable of dealing with the present threat.’

Rumiko nodded. She couldn’t tell the legionary that the admiral bore that rank due to familial reputation and that he had consistently failed upwards throughout his career. Over the course of the next quarter-hour, she watched his manoeuvres against the traitor fleet through her monocular display. Rote and unimaginative, but adequate to the situation.

The traitor fleet was outclassed.

‘Warp translation. Multiple signatures,’ the Master of Auspex announced.

Her stomach dropped through the deck.

‘Where and how many?’

‘Sixteen signatures. Bearing zero-three-eight mark zero-three-one. Range, two-four-four decimal four-two megametres. Correction. Eighteen signatures.’

‘Damnation.’ Rumiko sank into the sella mandatum. The tide of battle had just turned towards the disastrous.

‘Helm, clear all moorings and run up the mains. Vox, inform orbital, our extraction operations cease immediately. Craft aboard may depart if they wish to take their chances. Our bays will close in two minutes. Any ship not clear stays with us. Auspex, sever all electromag tethers with the orbital plate. Enginarium–’

Sergeant Jaelald interrupted her stream of commands with one resounding word. ‘Stop.’

Actions on the strategium came to a standstill.

Rage bloomed in Rumiko’s chest. She rose from the command throne and turned on the Space Marine. She gestured to an open area to the rear of the bridge where they might confer. ‘Sergeant, a word if you please.’

Rumiko straightened her tunic and used the action as an exercise to keep her emotions in check. The legionary didn’t say a word.

‘Sergeant, I am aware that some Astartes have been trained in the domain of void warfare. Might we be so fortunate regarding your experience?’

Jaelald ignored her question. ‘I have my orders. As you have yours. The orbital plate must be defended. At all costs.’

‘Understood and agreed. However, I needn’t remind you of the principle of unity of command. If we are to succeed in our mission, I cannot have anyone gainsaying my orders. Even you, sergeant. If you wish, I will cede command to you, but I suspect that would rather jeopardise the defence of the plate and Cthonia itself.’

The legionary didn’t move. She may as well have been speaking to a statue.

The Master of Auspex announced, ‘Correction. Twenty-one signatures. Correction. Twenty-six signatures. Previous bearing unchanged.’

Rumiko forced herself to inhale and exhale deeply. ‘Additionally, the Ferrum Purgatio is a ship of the line, not an orbital station. Not a planetary defence fortress. Our firepower advantages are coupled with our ability to manoeuvre. And against such overwhelming numbers… manoeuvre we must.’

Green eye-lenses stared back at her. A long moment passed. Long enough for Rumiko to consider that she might have overstepped, despite her captaincy.

Finally, Sergeant Jaelald spoke. ‘Proceed.’

Rumiko didn’t waste an instant and addressed the bridge. ‘You have your orders. Enginarium, ready void shields. Activate in…’ She drew forth her chrono, snapped the face open, and activated a timer. ‘Two minutes. Mark.’

She sat back down in the command throne and strapped herself in.

Rumiko turned her head to address Legionary Jaelald. ‘My lord, I’m afraid the strategium’s design may not accommodate Astartes physiology. Might I suggest–’

She was interrupted by two loud thumps as the Space Marine mag-locked his feet to the decking.

‘Incoming transmission from the Praxis Delictum. One-way transmission on encrypted wideband,’ the Vox Master said.

Rumiko understood the unspoken implications. Even a Mars-pattern battle cruiser like the Praxis Delictum couldn’t face these numbers. The traitors outnumbered the loyalist fleet nearly three to one.

Admiral Cambaelas appeared on the hololith. ‘All ships. Clear the system. It is vital Terra receives intelligence of this action. Astropathic communication may not suffice. Deliver a warning physically if possible. We shall conduct a fighting withdrawal in good order and clear the system as we might. Fight well. May your guns fire true. For the Imperium!’ He turned from the pict recorder and before the transmission ended, issued commands to his task force. ‘Close order. Line of battle ahead. Bring us closer to Cthonia. Then after–’ The message ended.

The admiral behaved valiantly, and Rumiko felt a twinge of guilt at having maligned him in her thoughts earlier. She could apologise to him later. If he survived.

If any of them survived.

‘Vox, get me the Sanguinem Victus. Tight beam.’

In a few seconds, Captain Gregmund’s concerned face appeared on the hololith. ‘Dire straits, Captain Salakia.’

‘Indeed. I have new orders for you, Baldo. And you’re not going to like them,’ Rumiko said. She’d served with Baldo Gregmund for years, and by all rights the Ferrum Purgatio should have been his command.

He smiled ruefully. ‘Let me guess. You want me to make a run for Terra.’

Rumiko nodded. ‘Just so. Your frigate has the best chance of clearing the system. Go now, at best speed.’

‘You know we would have stayed,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Goodbye, Rumiko. Fight well.’

‘Goodbye, Baldo. All speed.’

The hololith winked out.

Rumiko addressed Lieutenant Mirius: ‘See to it that our astropaths send a warning to Terra.’

‘Aye, ma’am,’ he said, and turned his attention to the data-slate mounted at his station.

‘Vox, enable a closed circuit from the command throne to the secondary bridge,’ Rumiko said.

Immediately, Commander Aletur’s voice came through. ‘We are established, captain.’

‘Very well.’ Rumiko slaved her monocular to the hololith and the oculus simulacrum. The hololithic display showed a wireframe strategic view including Cthonia and the orbital plate. Behind it, the oculus defaulted to a split-window true-pict display focusing on magnified tactical perspectives of the Purgatio and her immediate surroundings. Rumiko’s displays fed directly into the strategium secundus. She would see Commander Aletur’s inputs on her visuals and vice versa.

She manipulated the display using the lectern’s data-slate and overlaid augur-array feeds of the immediate battlespace and various perimeters, denoting the planet’s gravity well. She zoomed out to the ongoing battle.

The loyalist forces were taking damage but availing themselves well.

‘Despite Admiral Cambaelas’ best efforts, we know some traitor ships will get through. They will have to decelerate by the time they reach this point.’ She marked an ‘X’ on the data-slate. ‘That’s when we’ll have them. Master of Ordnance, how many mines do we have aboard?’

‘Five hundred, ready to deploy. Not enough to lay an effective minefield. Nor have we the time, ma’am.’

‘Understood,’ Rumiko said. ‘We don’t need an effective minefield. We just need enough to slow them down. We’ll set the mines for delayed activation based on their incoming speeds and trajectories. We must stay close to the planet and the orbital plate. We must turn that to our advantage. We can use Cthonia’s gravity well to shape our orbital manoeuvres. Our strategy must lie in choosing the time and place of engagement to our favour. They’ll expect to overwhelm us. Commander Aletur, I will need your people to serve as a secondary fire control. I will need near-constant firing solutions for vessels within this perimeter.’ She drew a circle on the data-slate, and it appeared as a sphere on the hololithic display.

On the display, a holographic Sanguinem Victus cleared the edges of the sphere, racing away at flank speed towards the Mandeville point opposite the ongoing battle.

‘Feed me possible targets of opportunity and where we might combine efforts with orbital plate defences and the Sword of Truth.’

‘Void shields activated,’ Lieutenant Mirius announced.

‘Very well, close all void shutters. Whatever ships didn’t make it off are along for the ride,’ Rumiko said.

The Master of Auspex announced, ‘Incoming traitor vessels. Stormbirds and assault craft. Their trajectory suggests they are headed for the orbital plate.’

‘Open fire with flak cannons.’ She turned to Legionary Jaelald. ‘We’ll do what we can, but our concern must be for the capital ships. If they begin orbital bombardment, well… your forces have no way of combatting that.’

The deck vibrated with the recoil of the flak batteries.

‘Agreed,’ the Space Marine rumbled in answer. ‘My brothers yearn to battle these traitors. Rest assured, those who land will wish they hadn’t.’

Rumiko nodded in agreement but turned to address her command crew. ‘Master of Arms, see to it that we have weapons and chokepoint defences throughout the ship. Arm any of the Solar Auxilia or planetary militia who might still fight despite their injuries. They should be encouraged to do so. I don’t need to remind you that a boarding action by traitor forces is a danger which would render all other efforts futile.’

The Master of Arms turned to his station and began coordinating defences.

‘Vox, give me ship-wide.’ She waited a moment to compose her words. ‘Now hear this. This is the captain. Valiant crew of the Ferrum Purgatio, we are moments from an engagement which may see our beloved ship’s destruction.’

She paused to let the information sink in. ‘We have one chance. Every crew member must perform their duty to the absolute utmost of their ability, no matter how trivial it may seem. It is not happenstance you should find yourselves here, in this moment. This is destiny. These are the moments which will become legends spoken of millennia from now. Ensure we are remembered well. These traitors must be defeated so the light of the Imperium is never extinguished. It falls on each one of you to do this. All hands must rise to this occasion, or we are lost.’

She cut the vox.

‘Vox, open a channel to the Sword of Truth, so we may communicate our–’

The Master of Auspex interrupted. ‘New contacts. Warp translation. Five vessels. Bearing two-one-zero mark one-nine-five. Range four-two megametres.’

Lieutenant Mirius shouted, ‘That’s right on top of us! How?’

‘Torpedoes launched. To the stern. Multiples,’ the Master of Auspex said.

Rumiko sprang into action. ‘Helm, new heading. Two-one-zero mark one-nine-five. One-quarter acceleration. Auspex, give me prow view. Optimal magnification.’

On the screen ahead, the edge of the orbital plate swung away, replaced by seemingly open space until the receding engines of the Sanguinem Victus came into view. Magnification activated in stages until the view showed the ship definitively.

Just in time to see multiple lance batteries smash into it. The void shields buckled moments before a torrent of torpedo volleys struck. Explosions blossomed across the Victus, then a catastrophic detonation blew the ship apart. The Purgatio’s auspex went blind, momentarily overwhelmed by the Victus’ death.

Rumiko’s thoughts flew to Baldo Gregmund and his crew. She compartmentalised her emotions. There would be time to mourn later.

‘Ordnance, prepare torpedoes. Wide spread. We must disrupt their formation. That trick with the mines. We’re going to do it here instead.’ She drew a new circle on her data-slate between Cthonia and the new incoming ships.

Rumiko’s monocular and the hololith populated with targeting information from the new ships as the augur arrays came back online. She had a moment to note the names and displacements. They were thousands of kilometres away from where the Purgatio would drop the mines.

Talon – Nova Frigate

Conquest – Firestorm Frigate

Blood of Cthonia – Havoc Destroyer

Requiem of Antmura – Siluria Light Cruiser

Lupercal’s Spear – Eclipse Battle Cruiser

She knew these ships. She’d served alongside them. Their officers and crew were all oath-breakers and traitors.

Except the Lupercal’s Spear. She’d never seen that one before. She brought up a more detailed view, but the ship lurked just at the edge of auspex range.

Lupercal’s Spear – formerly, Bringer of Justice – last known commander: Captain Kyghon Dachoro.

A cascade of information followed detailing weapons, shield arrays, armour configuration and last known actions. The emotions she’d suppressed since the betrayal of her task force surged to the fore.

Rumiko smiled. ‘Finally. A silver lining.’

In addition to being a traitor, Dachoro was officious, pompous, and less than competent. She had a chance to make him pay.

She fed his anticipated course and speed data into the strategium cogitators and they spat out a timing solution that mirrored her estimates. She passed the data to the ordnance station.

‘Ordnance, drop mines as we pass through the region. Delayed activation. Belay wide spread on torpedoes. We want their formation to remain as tight as possible.’

‘Captain, shouldn’t we slow to place the mines effectively?’ Yeoman Licci asked, as was her duty. She wasn’t questioning Rumiko’s command. She was still trying to learn despite the situation.

Admirable.

Rumiko busied herself with calculations for her next manoeuvre. She prompted the second officer. ‘Lieutenant?’

Lieutenant Mirius answered, ‘By laying the mines while we are in motion, the captain is imbuing them with the Purgatio’s momentum. They will continue along this course… indefinitely. Or until they enter an orbit around Cthonia’s star. I suspect they’ll make contact sooner than that.’

Rumiko nodded as she completed her calculations and sent her projected manoeuvres to the cogitators and down to the secondary bridge. ‘Aletur, double-check these numbers. If we’re off by one iota…’

Commander Aletur’s voice came back immediately. ‘In work.’

Warning runes flashed across the cogitator displays, indicating the multiple fail-safes preventing Rumiko from executing her plan. She overrode each in turn.

‘Single torpedo launch. Second torpedo,’ Auspex’s mechanical voice announced.

Rumiko scanned the ships ahead. They were still out of range. ‘Bearing?’

The Master of Auspex was already answering her as she spoke. ‘One-eight-eight mark one-nine-two. Range, one-one megametres and closing. Course indicates a near miss if we maintain this heading.’

‘Behind us?’ Lieutenant Mirius questioned. He checked his station’s data-feeds. ‘They came from the Sword of Truth!’

Rumiko’s mind moved to betrayal. But then why would they dumb-fire their torpedoes? Why would they miss? The Legiones Astartes weren’t incompetent. ‘They must think we’re breaking orbit and abandoning the orbital plate. It’s a shot across the stern, as it were. But we can use it, with a bit of luck. Helm, use the Purgatio to mask the Sword of Truth’s torpedoes from the enemy. Ensure we change course before they reach five hundred kilometres. We don’t need them cooking off in our wake.’

Rumiko glanced at the hands on her chrono. ‘And slow down our acceleration to decimal two-three.’

‘Incoming message from the Sword of Truth,’ the Master of Vox said. ‘They are ordering us to return to our station.’

Rumiko looked to Sergeant Jaelald. ‘Your brethren don’t mince words, do they?’

‘No,’ Jaelald answered.

‘Vox, contact the Sword of Truth and let them know we are thankful for their assistance, but to conserve their ordnance. We will return to our station shortly.’

The small course correction into the path of the torpedoes and the change in velocity showed the Purgatio’s mines rocketing forward on the displays. They would become active in moments and detonate if any of the enemy ships drew near them. And the Sword of Truth had ensured at least one of them would. Rumiko needed to narrow their options farther. She drew a firing solution on her data-slate and sent it to the ordnance station.

‘Ordnance, short salvo. Three torpedoes. Proximity fuses.’

She chose the Conquest, one of the frigates. It surged forward in close formation with its sister frigate, Talon, and was nearest to the course of the incoming Sword of Truth’s torpedoes. She needed to nudge its course just a bit. Of course, if the Conquest didn’t adjust, the Purgatio’s torpedoes would find their mark. She presented the Conquest’s command with a no-win scenario.

‘Master Gunner, bring lance and macrobatteries online.’

‘Ready,’ the two stations responded simultaneously.

Rumiko checked the range of both incoming torpedoes and the enemy ships. The latter weren’t coming at her quickly enough.

‘Vox, open a channel to the Bringer of Justice… or the Lupercal’s Spear. Whatever they’re calling themselves.’

‘They are not responding.’

‘But they are receiving. Broadcast this. Captain Dachoro, this is Captain Rumiko Salakia. I’m disappointed, Kyghon. Surely treason is the only way you could get command of anything of note. And your masters let you keep the battle cruiser? You have my congratulations.’

The Master of Vox shook his head. ‘Nothing, captain.’

‘Give it a moment.’

‘Incoming transmission from–’

Rumiko cut him off with a gesture and pointed to the hololith. Kyghon Dachoro replaced the strategic view.

‘This is the Lupercal’s Spear. I see you have a new command as well. The Ferrum Purgatio looks to be a fine ship. A shame. Out of consideration for our past service, I’ll grant you a chance to join our fleet. Stand down. You are outnumbered and outgunned,’ Dachoro said.

‘But not outmatched. I don’t suppose you’d ask your pathetic companions to stand down so we may face off captain to captain?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Then I suppose I shall have to beat you five to one.’

Kyghon laughed. ‘Arrogant as ever. I will have additional satisfaction knowing you commanded the Purgatio when she burns.’

Rumiko nodded. ‘If. I escaped before and this time you lack the element of surprise. I pity you. Without the edge of treachery, you are simply incapable. I wonder if your new masters reward incompetence. Let’s find out together, shall we?’ She signalled to cut the link to the vox. ‘That should do it.’

Auspex announced, ‘Enemy ships have accelerated. Rate of closure increasing.’

Commander Aletur’s voice broke in from the secondary bridge. ‘Manoeuvres look good.’

The cogitators chimed in agreement an instant later.

Rumiko smiled.

‘Ordnance, fire torpedoes.’ Three torpedoes raced away from the Purgatio and towards the Conquest.

‘Helm, cut acceleration. Power from the mains to prow thrusters. Execute manoeuvre one.’ Everyone lurched forward and sideways as the kinetic dampeners struggled to compensate for the change in momentum. The Purgatio stayed on the same vector but slid sideways, pointing her broadsides at the enemy ships. She had just ‘crossed the “T”’ to the incoming fleet. She could bring her full broadsides to bear while they could only fire their prow and turret weapons if they wished to remain on course.

‘Gunner, lock onto the Talon.’ Rumiko glanced at her chrono. ‘Fire all lances and port-side macrobatteries.’

Licci looked confused. ‘They are still out of range.’

Rumiko held up a finger to the yeoman, indicating she should wait a moment. ‘Are they?’

‘Helm, prepare for one hundred and eighty-degree roll. Double-broadside manoeuvre.’

The Purgatio shuddered as the port macrobatteries, mass drivers and lance weapons fired at once. Rumiko monitored the power levels on the dorsal lance turrets and waited for them to recharge.

‘Incoming lance fire. Impacting void shields,’ Auspex’s mechanical voice rang out. The ship shuddered dully as the shields shunted the majority of the energy away. ‘The Lupercal’s Spear is breaking away on a different attack vector.’

‘Commander Aletur, track the Lupercal’s Spear. Try to see where she is going,’ Rumiko ordered.

‘Aye. In work.’

The Purgatio’s dorsal lance turrets came back online.

‘Helm, execute roll. Gunner, stand by to fire starboard-side macrobatteries and all lance weapons…’ Rumiko’s attention focused on the hands of her chrono. She saw the ships and manoeuvres in her mind’s eye. Mathematics and physics dictated the outcome. She didn’t need to watch the display.

Metal groaned as the Purgatio’s superstructure suffered the stresses of changed momentum. Rumiko sensed it wasn’t a groan of protest. The Purgatio’s machine-spirit stretched itself, like a warrior flexing at the onset of combat. She wanted revenge.

The weapon arcs aligned on the Talon.

‘Fire in sequence. Now. Now. Now.’ Rumiko snapped her fingers in time to punctuate her words. The Ferrum Purgatio bucked under the recoil of her cannons combined with the enemy fire striking the shields.

‘They’re firing again,’ Lieutenant Mirius said. ‘Tertiary void shield is down. Primary and secondary holding.’

Rumiko ordered, ‘Helm, mains. Fifty per cent acceleration. Three, two, one… burn.’

She was pushed back into the command throne as the kinetic dampeners did their best to compensate. ‘Execute manoeuvre two. Now.’

The Purgatio shot away from the incoming traitors and towards the far side of Cthonia.

Rumiko turned her attention to Yeoman Licci. ‘When we fired the macrobatteries the Talon was out of range as you noted, but you failed to account for their rate of closure. As did they. They were too concerned with the lance fire.’

The ship bucked violently, hard enough to shake Legionary Jaelald from his statue-like stance. He took a single step forward to brace himself.

‘Incoming lance fire. Secondary void shield is down.’

Rumiko felt her face tense in frustration. She had hoped the void shields would be more robust. She continued her lesson and pointed to the hololith’s strategic view.

The Talon ran into the first macrobattery volley just then. Digital representations of cascading explosions peppered her prow. She began to turn as her captain realised a second volley was speeding towards them.

The Sword of Truth’s torpedoes raced past the Purgatio towards the Conquest. The Conquest tried to turn as well, but the Talon’s proximity limited her options. She had nowhere to go.

Their point defences came online but targeted the Purgatio’s three torpedoes set with proximity fuses. The Sword of Truth’s torpedoes raced on, unopposed.

And then the Purgatio’s mines came online.

The traitor task force ran headlong into them.

The hololith rendered massive explosions across both frigates, until the Sword of Truth’s torpedoes struck the Conquest. The Conquest’s icon glowed brightly and winked out.

Auspex’s feed to the hololith ceased as the Conquest’s death overwhelmed the augur arrays. Ghost images of the last known positions and courses of the ships populated the view. On the tactical display, Cthonia loomed ever larger.

‘Gunner, target the Talon with dorsal lance turrets.’ They were the only weapons that had the Talon still within their targeting arcs. ‘Fire.’

Rumiko glanced at her chrono. The hololith should have come back online by now. The fact that it had not meant that the Purgatio’s lance weapons had delivered a mortal blow.

‘Vox, send to the… Lupercal’s Spear, with my compliments.’ Just speaking the name felt distasteful to her. ‘Three against one, Kyghon. I am prepared to accept your surrender.’

A rasping sound came from Legionary Jaelald and it took a moment for Rumiko to realise he was trembling with laughter.

Rumiko congratulated the crew. ‘Excellent work. We’ll have a moment as they recover. Get those void shields back online. Boost power to integrity fields, decrease acceleration to nil. Reverse heading. Prepare to burn retros.’

‘Message from the Lupercal’s Spear. It reads, “Have richer targets. Enjoy your brief respite,”’ the Master of Vox said.

On the tactical display, Cthonia swung out of view as the prow swept to the open void and the Purgatio’s main engines aimed at the planet. The kinetic dampeners screeched in protest at the unaccustomed abuse.

Rumiko turned to Legionary Jaelald. ‘Sergeant, we are heading back to our station above the plate, but we are moving too quickly and would overshoot Cthonia at our present rate. We will attempt to use the planet’s atmosphere to slow us as we fire our main engines to meet our orbital target.’

‘You will attempt?’ Jaelald asked.

Rumiko nodded. ‘If we fail, it won’t be our concern any longer.’

She leaned back in the command throne and took a moment to expand the strategic view. What remained of the loyalist fleet had scattered across the system. Each surviving vessel was now engaged in a struggle for survival against multiple opponents.

She searched for the Praxis Delictum, Admiral Cambaelas’ ship, and found it much nearer to the planet than she’d expected. The admiral was locked in a mortal exchange of fire with the Lupercal’s Spear and some escorts. The escorts harried the Praxis, while the Lupercal’s Spear brought the full might of an Eclipse-class battle cruiser to bear. The already wounded Praxis Delictum didn’t stand a chance. Rumiko forced herself to watch as the Lupercal’s Spear closed and delivered the death blow. She owed the admiral that much at least.

The Master of Helm spoke, her voice quiet and unemotional, her interface with the ship overriding her human demeanour. ‘Thirty seconds from first burn.’

Rumiko pushed her emotions from her mind. ‘Execute burn on your command. Stay within the parameters of the verified manoeuvre.’

The Purgatio’s main engines fired at the precise designated time and cut the velocity of the cruiser significantly. It wasn’t enough. Still she hurtled towards the planet. The cruiser altered trajectory slightly, moving with a nimble grace that belied her size.

‘Void shields back online,’ the Master of the Enginarium said. It hardly mattered. Void shields couldn’t protect against atmospheric re-entry. The ship’s hull began to glow, at first a dull ochre then yielding to a bright red, as the Purgatio kissed Cthonia’s upper atmosphere. The ship bucked and shook as winds it was never meant to weather struck at its surfaces. Integrity-field generators overloaded and rained sparks throughout the strategium and down onto the command dais.

Rumiko referenced her chrono. She prepared to give an order, but she had chosen her crew well.

‘Burning retros,’ came the still-distant voice from the helm.

The vibrations running through the ship grew wilder and stronger. A lumen-strip glowed brightly and then popped, showering the lower command deck with debris.

The tactical oculus showed the skin of the Purgatio glowing the orange-white of the forge. Sheets of armour the size of buildings curled back upon themselves as their outer surfaces ablated away.

She looked at her chrono. Just a few more seconds.

If their calculations were wrong, Cthonia’s atmosphere would shred the Purgatio. At the velocity they were travelling, it would happen so quickly no one aboard would even know.

‘Executing manoeuvre three,’ the helm announced.

The prow thrusters fired, pitching the Purgatio vertical against the planet, but exposing her entire cross-section to the buffeting winds. The ship’s vibrations grew nearly unbearable. Rumiko felt as if her teeth might fly from her skull in an instant.

On the lower dais, a station exploded and set alight the servitor attending it. Acrid smoke swept from the area, bearing the incongruous smells of hydraulic fluids, oils and burning flesh.

‘Firing main engines,’ helm announced.

The acceleration slammed them back into their stations. Grey dots flooded Rumiko’s view and blackness crept in at the edges as her vision tunnelled.

She had to shout to be heard over the howling of the atmosphere’s interaction with the hull.

‘Enginarium, increase power to integrity fields and kinetic dampeners.’

She didn’t hear his acknowledgement, but the weight crushing her down lessened perceptibly.

Then, faster than she would have guessed, the atmospheric roar died down to a whistle, and then silence.

Rumiko let out a breath and felt the tension run from her as the bridge crew cheered.

Commander Aletur’s voice broke through on the comms. ‘One for the record books to be sure.’

The Purgatio tipped past the vertical, continuing until her prow matched her direction of travel once again and she continued her parabolic arc around the planet. Rumiko’s monocular showed their altitude above the planet climbing rapidly. The atmosphere hadn’t slowed them as much as she’d estimated.

‘Helm, slow us down a bit, we don’t want to overshoot our mark. Ordnance, prepare torpedoes.’

She glanced at the time signature on her monocular and verified it on her chrono.

‘We should see the edge of the orbital plate in a few seconds.’

On cue, the orbital plate came into view like a sunrise against the edge of Cthonia’s surface. Hundreds of assault craft, bombers and fighters swarmed around it.

The Purgatio sailed slightly beneath it, but as the plate drew nearer the ship’s trajectory became even with it and then slightly above. Gargantuan explosions ruptured the surface of the orbital plate and drew gasps from several of the crew members.

The Sword of Truth traded horrific blows with the traitor destroyer, Blood of Cthonia, and though she conducted herself well, it was only a matter of time. She needed help now.

‘Ordnance, fire all torpedoes at the Blood of Cthonia. Gunner, lance batteries at the same.’

Rumiko paused, her eyes disbelieving what the displays showed her. The Blood of Cthonia and Requiem of Antmura emptied their torpedo magazines at the orbital plate.

‘Auspex, confirm trajectory of enemy ordnance!’ She raised her voice despite herself.

The monotone mechanical voice validated the other indicators.

‘Helm, get us between the plate and those torpedoes. Gunner, all macrobatteries and lances at that ordnance.’

The enemy were conducting an orbital bombardment of the plate. Loyalist forces on the surface would be devastated – nuclear-class warheads wouldn’t give them a chance. She couldn’t allow that to happen.

‘Torpedo impacts on Blood of Cthonia.’

Rumiko gave the destroyer’s status a cursory glance on the display. The ship foundered, tumbling away to a different orbital plane.

She contacted the secondary bridge. ‘Aletur, I cede fire control of lance turrets, flak cannons and point defences to you. Fire as they bear.’

An instant later, enemy bombers strafed the Purgatio with strings of bombs as the cruiser’s defensive fire downed too few of them.

The Purgatio rumbled with the impacts of catastrophic explosions. Damage-indicator runes flashed across the displays and data-panels.

On the tactical oculus, she watched the incoming torpedoes as distant points. She increased the magnification. They would be able to intercept them, but only just.

‘Enginarium, where are my void shields?’

‘One is online. Two is recovering. Three is non-responsive.’

Rumiko strained forward against the command seat’s straps. Her hands gripped the arms of the throne, knuckles turning white.

‘Torpedoes inbound. Ten seconds.’

Her eyes locked with the Master of the Enginarium. He shook his head. Not enough time.

‘Vox, ship-wide. Brace for impact!’

Lieutenant Mirius echoed her command. ‘Sound collision!’

Klaxons and alarm bells sounded.

And then the torpedoes struck. Cataclysmic explosions first buckled the remaining void shield and then detonated all along the Purgatio’s port side.

Cogitator banks exploded outwards, shredding their attendant servitors and crew members with shrapnel. Displays winked out one by one and then the lumens collapsed, plunging them all into darkness.

Another explosion rocked the ship, this one making the others appear distant. Rumiko knew a torpedo had impacted the ship’s superstructure, not far from the bridge.

She instinctively thumbed the comms button to the secondary bridge. ‘Aletur, what’ve you got?’

There was no response.

She smelled ozone and the coppery tang of blood.

Her body rose against the command throne’s straps and she knew they’d lost gravity.

‘Emergency power.’

A moment later, feeble lumen-strips fluttered into life. A broken and bleeding servitor floated across the bridge.

She galvanised her crew back into action. ‘Status? We’re still here. Do your duty. And let’s give those bastards as good as we’ve gotten.’

Lieutenant Mirius relayed status from his station as it came back online. ‘Void shields are down. One is recharging. Two and three offline. Negative pressure detected on decks one-twenty-eight to one-thirty-seven port side. Loss of hull integrity. Deck eight appears to be open to the void.’

Rumiko’s monocular projected casualty rates exceeding eighteen thousand crew. She blinked the information away.

The tactical view came back online. The Sword of Truth pointed directly at the Requiem of Antmura and fired her engines for flank speed.

‘What are they doing?’ Rumiko said aloud.

‘The only thing they can,’ Sergeant Jaelald’s rumbling voice answered.

‘I apologise, sergeant. I had assumed the traitors wanted to capture the orbital plate. It appears I was mistaken.’

‘My brothers will have come to the same conclusion. Allow them time to withdraw to the planet’s surface,’ Jaelald said.

The Sword of Truth slammed into the Requiem of Antmura. The impact mortally wounded the Requiem and sent it careening. The Sword of Truth only lasted a few seconds before a series of cascading explosions ripped across her from prow to stern, reducing her to fiery debris.

‘Torpedoes incoming from the Lupercal’s Spear,’ the Master of Auspex called out, tension apparent even within the mechanical voice. Kyghon had managed to clear the planet and bring his ordnance to bear. Perhaps she hadn’t given him enough credit.

‘Void shields!’ She knew the order was useless as she shouted it. ‘Helm, roll the ship. Spread out the impacts.’

The tactical oculus showed the view rolling as the Purgatio struggled against her own mass and tried to react quickly against the laws of physics. The second volley of torpedoes struck.

Mayhem filled Rumiko’s world.

The lumens flickered again. A thin stream of light poured in from the oculus above the command dais. Light reflected from Cthonia’s star by the planet itself. It crept through a fissure in the void shutters and passed down through the armaglass, unfiltered and ethereal.

But this time the damage had been mitigated. The lumens returned along with gravity.

The displays snapped back to life and Rumiko stared horrified at what they showed.

The Requiem of Antmura oriented itself to point directly at the orbital plate and fired her main engines.

There was nothing the Purgatio could do but observe.

‘We have reports of Traitor Astartes on deck seven!’ the Master of Arms shouted. ‘Our people can’t hold them off.’

The traitor light cruiser, over four kilometres in length and nearly five hundred metres abeam, smashed into the orbital plate at full acceleration. As her reactors went critical, tectonic explosions rippled out from the point of impact with enough force to level mountains.

The orbital plate lost integrity and shattered. Debris tumbled in titanic chunks towards the planet below and outwards towards the Purgatio. The Lupercal’s Spear broke away, and Rumiko lost track of it on her display amid the interference and chaos.

She sat dumbstruck at the amount of devastation filling the display. There could be no survivors.

The battle was lost.

‘New contacts. Traitor vessels entering orbit,’ Auspex reported.

That meant the loyalist delaying action was over too. It was academic, now.

Lieutenant Mirius prodded her into action. ‘Your orders, captain?’

She looked at him and realised that tears occluded the vision on her monocular. She pulled the device off her face. ‘We run.’ Her voice sounded faint and cracked to her ears. ‘Sergeant Jaelald, will you be so kind as to see to our unwelcome guests?’ But when she turned to him, he was no longer there. She wasn’t sure when he had left the bridge.

Rumiko nodded as she forced herself to regain her composure. She exhaled deeply. ‘We run.’ Her voice issued firm and direct. ‘We make for Terra. We carry the warning.’

Her hand snatched at the data-slate in the arm of the command throne and she plotted a new course and sent it to the helm. ‘Helm, here, come to a new heading. Burn main engines. All ahead full.’

The course looked to take them directly into the heart of Cthonia.

Yeoman Licci gave her a puzzled look.

‘Not to worry, yeoman. I don’t mean to crash us into the surface. We will execute a gravity assist to boost us away from the planet and into the system on a hyperbolic trajectory. We should gain enough additional acceleration to let us outrun these curs.’

‘What’s to stop the traitors from doing the same?’ Licci asked.

‘Nothing. Except that we aren’t their objective.’

‘Incoming transmission from the Lupercal’s Spear. “You’re running again, but you won’t get away this time. Didn’t you want to fight one on one? To see which of us is actually the best? You chide me for stealing my command. At least I earned it. Your masters just needed a placeholder. You’re just a name for them to read aloud from the memorial rolls.”’

Rumiko bristled, but she wouldn’t give Kyghon the satisfaction. ‘No response, Vox. They can chase us if they like. In the meantime, Gunner, target incoming debris. Do what you can.’ Some of the pieces of rubble were larger than the Purgatio itself.

Rumiko focused the tactical display aft. It was initially disorienting as the Purgatio dived between tumbling chunks, which scattered outwards at remarkable speeds.

‘Vox, contact the planet surface and warn them of incoming orbital wreckage. Perhaps they will be able to take shelter.’ She couldn’t imagine the devastation that would follow the de-orbiting remnants of the orbital plate. She assumed there would be someone new in the chain of command to pick up the pieces of the disaster, and she silently wished them well.

‘Reactor three suffered critical damage in the last exchange. I shut it down to avoid widespread contamination,’ the Master of the Enginarium informed her.

‘Very well. Void shields?’

‘We no longer have enough power to activate the third shield or the dorsal and ventral lance turrets. They are offline. Void shield one is nearly restored. Two is still offline, I’m afraid.’

The Purgatio swung in a low orbit over Cthonia and then rocketed outwards towards one of the system’s Mandeville points. The manoeuvre brought her an additional fifty per cent gravity in acceleration, which would make her difficult for the traitors to catch.

‘Master of Arms, what is the status of the action to repel boarders?’

‘Leaning towards our forces, but with severe losses.’

Rumiko nodded. That was out of her hands. She imagined she could hear the dull thump of weapons fire echoing through the corridors and decks below.

‘How is our Geller field?’ All would be for naught if they could not translate into the empyrean.

‘Tolerable,’ Enginarium replied. His voice did not sound confident.

The Master of Auspex interrupted, ‘Lupercal’s Spear on intercept course.’

Rumiko’s breath hissed between her teeth. She chided herself for losing situational awareness in the wake of the plate’s destruction.

She centred the tactical view and the hololith on the incoming contact and snapped her monocular back into place over her eye. The data populated.

Kyghon had positioned his battle cruiser just off the Purgatio’s path in an attempt to stop her from disengaging.

Poetic.

Rumiko would have to change course, bleeding off the precious and hard-won boost of the gravity assist, or weather a sure-to-be-devastating broadside. They were going to lose.

Her fist pounded the arm of the command throne as an expletive left her lips.

Lieutenant Mirius tried to add some levity, considering the dire situation. ‘I’ve got a bottle of raenka that says you come up with something, captain.’

She couldn’t disappoint her crew. Rumiko took the gesture as it was intended. ‘Contraband, lieutenant? I’m shocked. I should have you censured. But then I wouldn’t be able to accept your wager.’

The ships were thousands of kilometres away from one another, but the rate of closure reduced the time until contact to mere minutes.

Rumiko scanned the Lupercal’s Spear. She hadn’t fared as well as it had initially seemed during her confrontation with the Praxis Delictum and wreckage from the orbital plate. She had a gaping wound over a large portion of her port side, which vented atmosphere and shed large fragments of debris. Kyghon favoured that side, choosing to pass the Purgatio to the starboard. This suited Rumiko as the Purgatio’s own port side had suffered severe damage.

Then she had an idea.

‘Ordnance, prepare to launch torpedoes on delayed activation. Just use the impetus from the magnetic propulsion from the tubes to expel. Set their plasma drives on a delay.’ She verified the rate of closure and plotted a new course that wouldn’t bleed off too much of their velocity on their current vector. This would force the Lupercal’s Spear to turn to keep her within weapon arcs. And once the Spear turned, the gash in her port side would be exposed to the torpedoes.

Scattered and ineffective incoming fire from the Spear peppered the void around the Purgatio.

‘Hold…’ Rumiko said.

‘Lupercal’s Spear is firing torpedoes. Full spread.’

That was what Rumiko had been waiting for. ‘Helm, execute new course. And roll the ship one-eighty. Prepare for double broadside.’

Yeoman Licci grew concerned. ‘Ma’am, that exposes our damaged port side.’

On the tactical display, the Lupercal’s Spear looked inverted to the Purgatio.

‘Correct. Enginarium, don’t let that void shield go down.’

Enginarium nodded, even though Rumiko knew there wasn’t much he’d be able to do about it.

‘Ordnance, launch our torpedoes, tight group. Delayed activation. Now.’

The ship shuddered as the prow tubes ejected the inert torpedoes just far enough that they cleared the vessel.

The new course took them easily out of the incoming torpedoes’ reach. They shot by, moving through the space the Purgatio would have been occupying.

The Lupercal’s Spear turned to engage them, just as Rumiko had known Kyghon would.

As the ships raced past one another, Rumiko said, ‘Port batteries fire.’

The Purgatio convulsed as her macrobatteries fired in sequence – slightly early, accounting for the Spear’s closing distance.

‘Roll for double broadside!’ Rumiko ordered.

The Spear responded with fire of her own.

‘The void shield won’t hold.’

‘Brace for impact.’

An instant later the Purgatio’s void shield collapsed.

But the incoming fire rained down along the ship’s previously undamaged dorsal plane, and though she bled molten metal, the armour there served its function. The ship continued its roll to deliver the second half of the double broadside. Her starboard macrobatteries and lances belched forth, firing to the aft extreme of her weapon arcs. The Spear’s void shield flared brightly then crumpled.

‘Vox, to Lupercal’s Spear. Kyghon, now we learn what happens when we face one another on equal terms. You lose. Your name won’t be read from the memorial rolls. There are no such honours for traitors. No one will remember you at all.’ Rumiko gestured to cut the vox.

The Spear continued to turn to keep the Purgatio in her arcs.

On the hololith, the Purgatio’s delayed torpedoes activated and raced towards the Spear’s open wound. Catastrophic explosions drove the battle cruiser’s reactors critical, and she gave birth to a temporary star.

Rumiko turned to Yeoman Licci. ‘Yeoman, tell our Navigator to translate as soon as is practicable. Our destination is Terra. Lieutenant Mirius…’ She turned to face her second officer.

‘Yes, captain?’

‘About that bottle of raenka?’

THE GANGS BENEATH

GARY KLOSTER

The bolt cracked into the rock wall next to Crius’ head and exploded, shattering stone into razor-edged shrapnel that rattled off the Imperial Fist’s helmet.

‘Crius!’ Sergeant Liber’s voice crackled over the vox, smeared almost into unintelligibility by interference. ‘Where are they?’

A hail of bolts smashed around Crius, and the mineshaft was filled with chips of rock and dust. One round crashed into his leg, but it ricocheted off the thick ceramite of his armour and burst in the air. Crius grunted and shifted, throwing himself into one of the holes that corrosion had eaten in the side of the massive steel pipe that ran along one wall of this tunnel. The metal blocked some of the incoming fire, but past its jagged edge he could still sort out what was happening.

A few ancient lumens glowed down through air thick with dust and smoke. The visor of Crius’ armour cut through the gloom and haze and picked out the traitors moving up the tunnel towards him: five Sons of Horus, their sea green armour gleaming in the scraps of light.

By the Emperor, how he’d grown to hate that colour.

‘Five Sons straight ahead.’ The vox crackled in Crius’ ear as he spoke, and he hoped his squad could hear. This tunnel ran beneath the ancient atomic plant that powered this mine, and its thick shields of steel and concrete broke the vox’s signal almost to incoherence. ‘They’re moving forward.’ He sent a stream of fire down the tunnel, bright sparks flashing when his bolts smashed across the traitor’s armour, and the steel pipe shook with the impact of their returned fire.

Crius had seen something, just before dodging back from those bolts. His visor responded to an unspoken command and opened a window in the corner of his vision, a playback of those last few seconds. Almost hidden in the haze, something else had moved. Someone. Mortals, cowering behind the massive armoured figures.

‘Five Sons and some mortals behind. Unarmed and unarmoured.’ A bolter round punched through a thin part of the pipe and slammed from wall to wall before exploding behind him. ‘Orders?’ he asked, knowing what he wanted. To charge those traitors, bolter firing until it glowed, until his shells smashed through their armour and found the flesh beneath…

How long had he been on Cthonia, this wretched rock that had birthed the traitor Horus? How long had he been fighting Horus’ sons, battling them first in the tower of Traitor’s Gate, and now in the twisted labyrinth of tunnels carved out of the bedrock below that vast hive city? How long had he choked on dust, and darkness, and death?

Too long, and of dust and darkness Crius had had his fill, but of death… No. He could feast on death until every star went out and all the universe fell into night… Or until he’d killed every Son of Horus.

‘Hold,’ Sergeant Liber’s voice jittered through Crius’ helmet, full of static. ‘Pin them in place. We come.’

Hold. Crius locked his teeth behind his visor. Not the order he wanted, but Liber had proven himself as a leader, over and over.

‘Holding,’ Crius answered, and he stepped out of cover again. The Sons were closing on him slowly, probably suspecting that the rest of his squad were right behind and trying to flush them out. Crius knew from the trackers built into their armour that his brothers were approaching, but they’d taken a different route to the one he’d been scouting out when he’d found these traitors. They would have been here by now if they had charged down the path he’d taken, but Liber must have had some other plan. Crius sent a stream of steel and fire towards the Sons, making them stop to fire back.

Bolts slammed around him, smashing stone and corroded steel, but he ignored them. One of his rounds caught a Son in the chest and knocked him back, the legionary’s armour cracking beneath the blow. Crius focused his fire on the downed man, trying to smash through weakened battleplate, but one of the other Sons caught him with a bolt in the side of his helmet. The explosive round went off, snapping Crius’ head back, and for a moment everything went dark. But his body, altered by the sacred gene-seed, ripped him back to consciousness before he hit the rough stone floor.

Crius caught himself and rolled, hearing shots slamming in around him, but he couldn’t see. His visor was a mass of static, shattered by the blow. With a curse, he commanded his armour to unlock it, and he tore it off.

His eyes adjusted instantly, and Crius could see the Sons rushing him. Snarling, he grabbed a grenade and hurled it. It went off with a crack that echoed down the mineshaft, and two of the Sons were smashed to the ground while the others stopped, staggered. Crius raised his bolter and fired, aiming at the traitor with the cracked and buckled breastplate. Crius’ bolts caught him in his damaged chest, and the Son went flying back as his armour crunched inwards and the explosive rounds penetrated. Blood fountained out, and in the muzzle flash of the bolters, Crius could see it painting that green armour bright red.

One down, now the next, Crius thought, as bolts tore through the air past his head. His bolter was chattering in his hand as the rest of the traitors started to move forward again, but he could see one of them pulling a chainsword out, its blade screaming as the Son raised it up…

Then hell took them.

Flames roared, washing over the traitors. The fire didn’t reach Crius, but he felt its killing heat and had to raise a hand to protect his eyes. Through armoured fingers he could see the Sons of Horus turning away from him as another wave of flame rolled over them. Out of the fire came a figure, yellow armour glowing gold with flame, the great gauntlet on his hand crackling with power as he swung it up and caught one of the traitors in the chin. There was a flash as energy surged, and helmet and head were smashed to pulp, flying back and away.

‘Glory to the primarch!’ Sergeant Liber shouted as the rest of his squad poured forward, firing their bolters.

‘Glory to the Legion!’ Crius answered back as his bolter sang.

The crunch of armoured feet and the rattle-tap of falling pieces of stone seemed quiet after the thunder of bolters. In that almost-silence Crius took a deep breath, bringing the scent of rock dust, explosives, flamer fuel and burnt blood.

‘There is a dead one here,’ Darrio said, staring down at a small, charred corpse lying in the middle of the tunnel.

‘The dead do not concern me,’ Liber said. ‘Find the living.’ The sergeant was standing next to Milon, the other veteran from the 212th Company. Crius, Darrio, and the last member of the squad, Aelia, had been part of different squads in the 532nd Company, until the slow attrition of this long, brutal battle with the Sons of Horus had caused the company leaders to piece together new squads with what survivors they had.

Crius looked at the corpses of the traitors, scattered across the tunnel floor, and wanted to shoot them again.

‘Crius, Darrio, Aelia. Search the mortals out.’

Crius nodded. He hadn’t seen any sign of them since that glimpse at the beginning of the fight. If they’d been smart, they’d have run as fast as they could when the bolters had spoken. But the legionaries had to see if they could find them.

These mining tunnels had belonged to the underhives – the rabble of gangers and outcasts and mutants hiding from the billions who had kept the great hive that towered over them running. Most of them had fled when the battle between the Imperial Fists and the Sons of Horus had begun, but a few still hid in the no-man’s-lands that lay between the Fists’ defensive lines and the Sons’ siege positions. The Fists mostly drove them off, keeping the few that showed the potential to be new recruits, but the Sons sometimes used them as spies and scouts.

Crius moved across the tunnel, searching, the air cool against the bare skin of his face, so unfamiliar after wearing his armour for so long. His helmet hung from his belt, a huge gash torn in one side. There was no way he could wear it until he’d taken it back for repair, whenever they finally got back.

They’d been hunting through these passages for days, searching for signs of where the Sons of Horus might mount their next attack, probing for weaknesses in the traitors’ lines, and mapping the tangled net of mining and maintenance tunnels – a task that had helped them today. One of those maps had shown Sergeant Liber the side tunnel that had let him hit the traitors from their flank, pinning them between Crius and the rest of the squad so that they could be destroyed, as was right and good.

The question, though, was what was this squad of traitors doing here with a group of mortals?

The mineshaft was empty. Crius looked at the pipe he’d sheltered in and stepped into one of the holes corroded in its side. The darkness was deep in here, but he finally heard something. A liquid crunch, the sound of a blade biting into flesh. Crius moved towards it as the sound came again, and again. Closer, his eyes picked out the shadows of small figures, crouched around a giant. With an unspoken command a lumen flickered to life on his armour and filled the broken pipe with light.

There were two mortals standing against the curving wall of the pipe: a man and a young woman, each ragged and filthy. Metal collars had been fitted around their necks and a chain connected them, running back to a Son of Horus who lay sprawled on his back. His armour had been shattered by bolter fire, revealing head, neck and part of his chest. Crouched over him was the last mortal, another woman, older, her short hair gone mostly grey. She held the traitor’s blade, a combat knife that looked like a sword in her hands. Her thin arms raised it high, ready to drive it down again into the dead traitor’s face.

‘Drop the blade,’ Crius said, his bolter aimed just over the collar wrapped around her neck.

She stopped, the blade held high, her lips pulled back from her crooked teeth in a snarl. ‘I’ll drop it when I know he’s dead!’

Crius’ finger tightened on his trigger, almost pulling, but… A memory flashed through his mind, so old and strange it seemed like something that had happened to someone else. A flash from the time before his ascension, from when he’d been a mortal wretch like these. It was an image of a man’s face, blood and teeth flying as a heavy steel wrench smashed down into it, again and again.

Then the memory vanished, gone as fast as it had come, and Crius pulled the trigger.

The bolter cracked, and the head of the Son of Horus disintegrated in a gout of crimson, covering the woman in blood and gore.

‘He’s dead,’ Crius said, and stripped the knife from her hands.

‘They should be cleansed,’ Milon said, his fingers tapping on the hilt of his knife as he stared at the kneeling mortals.

‘I want to know what they are doing here,’ Liber said. He was sorting through the armaments that they had taken from the Sons, working with Darrio and Aelia to pack up what they could use. The siege kept stretching longer, and the only way the Imperial Fists could resupply themselves was by stripping the bodies of these traitors.

‘Trying to kill us.’ Milon was a good fighter, a veteran who wielded his flamer with the precision of an Apothecary. But the aim of his fury was much less precise. ‘Servants of the Sons, they defy the Emperor. Death is the only answer to such.’

‘Servants?’ Crius said, holding up the chain that he’d torn from the Son of Horus.

Milon turned his helmet to him. He’d just saved Crius’ life, and Crius was certain that Milon would wade into a field of traitors, fighting to his last breath to defend any of his brother Astartes. That dedication had nothing to do with admiration; Milon didn’t like anyone. But he respected Liber, and when the sergeant spoke, Milon checked whatever he had been about to say to Crius.

‘Not willing allies.’ Liber stepped to the chained man. He was big for a mortal, but childlike when compared to the sergeant’s armour-clad bulk. ‘Tell me, mortal, what purpose did the Sons of Horus have for you?’

The man’s eyes were wild, frightened and angry. Looking at him, Crius remembered that memory that had flashed through his head before. That flash of blood and teeth, of hate and horror. Then the man shut his eyes, refusing to look into Liber’s armoured face.

‘They are useless, sergeant,’ Milon said. ‘Our time is better served disposing of them and searching for the purpose of this patrol ourselves, instead of listening to the lies of the servants of traitors.’ The Imperial Fist looked at the chain that linked the humans all together. ‘Or slaves,’ he growled, and contempt filled his voice. ‘The distinction matters not.’

‘But it may.’ Crius went to the grey-haired woman, who sat silent, her head up but not looking at any of the armoured men that surrounded them. The younger woman crouched beside her like an animal, eyes down but lips pulled back, teeth bared.

Crius ignored her and looked at the other woman. Blood striped her skin, the deep-red blood of a legionary, and something in Crius twisted, knowing that the traitor’s blood was the same colour as his. ‘You,’ he said, shoving that anger down for now. ‘You have no love for the Sons of Horus.’

‘No,’ she said, her voice thin, quiet. ‘I’ve no love for any of you angels of the void. Not those greens, or you golds.’

‘They don’t even understand the treachery of the Sons,’ Milon muttered.

Crius watched the woman, ignoring his brother. She tried to stare back at him, but she couldn’t meet his eyes for long. ‘You don’t love us,’ Crius said. ‘But you don’t hate us the way you hate them.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Crius asked, keeping his eyes on her.

‘Because…’ she started, quiet at first, but then her words turned fierce. ‘Because they hurt me and mine. Took our tunnels, then called us thieves for rooting through their middens. They caught us, and they hurt us.’

Teeth and blood. The memory flashed through Crius’ head again. Most of his mortal past was gone, forgotten. Lost, the way his once weak body was lost. But that memory, blood and teeth, it had somehow stayed, like a fragment of bone caught between the teeth of his mind.

He’d been a ganger, a child fighting for survival deep beneath Necromunda, and he’d been caught by a rival gang. Caught and tortured. They were going to kill him, but he’d broken free. He should have run, but he’d picked up a wrench instead and slipped through the dark den of the rival gang until he found their leader, the one who’d beat him hardest, and fallen on him with that makeshift weapon…

That’s all that remained. He didn’t know what had happened after, how he’d survived his gory vengeance. Those memories hadn’t been strong enough to survive. Only that memory of fear, of hate, of being captured and helpless. Only that had lasted.

‘The Sons of Horus, the green ones. They hurt you. Now you want to kill them.’ She nodded, silent, and Crius reached out and grasped the crude metal collar fitted around her neck. His armoured fingers, deft and strong, snapped the metal without bruising her fragile mortal skin. ‘So do we. We want to kill them all.’

The man who’d led them, Ahk, was the charred corpse on the tunnel floor. Kryt was the man, and the grey-haired woman was called Betre.

‘When the green ones caught us, they were gonna kill us. But Ahk tried to bargain.’ She took a sip of water from the canteen Crius had given her, then handed it to the younger woman, who was called Nym. ‘He shoulda just let them. Better dead than chained, but Ahk was scared to die.’ Betre spat in the direction of his body.

‘We have no time for this,’ Milon muttered, but Liber raised a hand and the veteran settled.

‘What bargain did Ahk make?’ Liber asked. Betre’s eyes flicked towards Crius, and he nodded at her.

‘Ahk told ’em how we know these tunnels, up and down, back and forth, all the secret ways. So they asked if he knew a way past your defences, and Ahk said yeah.’

Milon snarled, and Nym made a sound part whimper, part growl.

‘Where?’ Crius asked.

Betre raised a hand and pointed at the huge pipe. ‘That steel tunnel goes into the stone, but it comes out again at the eight-side shaft that runs to the surface.’

‘I know that place,’ Crius said. ‘It is well past our defensive lines. Near the chamber where we store munitions.’ If the Sons of Horus had come out there… one grenade could have blown a hole in the Imperial Fists’ territory and wiped out most of the ammunition stored in this sector.

‘We were blessed today, brothers,’ Sergeant Liber said, staring down at the bodies of the Sons. ‘We have denied these traitors a great victory.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Betre said. ‘What you gonna do about those that are following us?’

‘Here.’ Betre pointed to where the five lines representing mine tunnels intersected at a chamber. They had scratched them into the tunnel floor with combat knives, making a crude map the mortals could see. ‘This is where they split. Those’ – she waved at the corpses of the Sons – ‘made us come ahead and mark the road. The others went hunting a group of golds, like you.’

‘Narus was leading a squad through that area,’ Liber said. The sergeant turned his helmet towards the woman, eye-lenses gleaming in the thin light. ‘How many other Sons were there?’

‘Ten,’ she said.

‘Two to one,’ Milon growled. ‘We’ll kill them all.’

Liber nodded, but he turned to look at the pipe behind them. ‘Bolters. A flamer. A few grenades. We can’t seal that tunnel with stone.’ He looked back at them, flexing the massive fingers of his power fist. ‘We’ll have to do it with blood.’

Crius and the others raised their bolters. ‘For the primarch, we kill!’

‘For the Legion,’ Liber said, ‘we triumph.’

Over the vox implanted in his ear, Crius could hear Liber trying to reach command, but there was only the crackle of interference. They were on their own, and the other Imperial Fists knew nothing about what was coming for them if their squad fell. Crius stared at his sergeant, and he could read his intentions in the set of his shoulders. Someone was going to be chosen, and Crius, with his broken helmet, feared it would be him.

‘Our brothers must know of the threat,’ Liber said. ‘Darrio. You will go down this hidden way, with all speed. If it comes out where these gangers say, warn the brothers you find there.’ Darrio nodded slowly, and Crius slapped his shoulder, understanding his brother’s pain at being sent from the fight. ‘But there needs to be more than one,’ Liber continued, ‘in case these mortals are lying, or wrong.’ Betre frowned, but Crius was focused on Liber again. ‘Someone must also carry the warning back the way we came.’ Liber’s helmet turned between Crius and Aelia. Then stopped, on Crius. ‘You held well for us once today, brother. Would you do it again?’

‘I would.’

Liber nodded. ‘Aelia. Go.’ The Imperial Fist nodded, then gave Crius a grim smile.

‘Kill them all, brother,’ Aelia said.

Crius nodded, and he watched as Aelia and Darrio moved out, heading down mining tunnel and corroded pipe, vanishing into the dark.

Liber didn’t watch them go. ‘We have little time. We must prepare a stand that will see those traitors blocked and broken.’

Crius nodded, but his eyes caught on the mortals crouching at the side of the tunnel.

‘What of them?’

‘They will betray us if we let them go, and impede us if they stay,’ Milon said. ‘Cleanse them, as I said.’

Crius watched the gangers as his brother spoke. Kryt shifted, a tiny movement the man tried to hide, but his preparation to run was as obvious as a shout to Crius’ senses. Obvious, too, to Betre. The woman slapped Kryt’s arm, warning the bigger man. But her eyes never left Crius.

‘Those greens bargained with Ahk, then chained us. You think we’d run back to them?’

‘No,’ Liber said, even as he looked over the tunnel, planning his defence. ‘But they caught you once.’

‘Not again,’ she growled. ‘Give us those guns.’ She nodded towards the bolters they’d taken from the Sons. ‘We’ll fight.’

Milon growled something too angry to be a laugh, but Crius stared back at her. ‘You would die.’

‘Here, with you, yeah,’ she said. ‘But these tunnels… I told you, we know them. We can hit them from behind, while they’re fighting you.’

‘Cowards,’ Milon muttered.

‘Tactics,’ Liber said. ‘Similar to what I ordered when we fought these.’ He nodded to the corpses on the floor, and Milon frowned but didn’t answer. ‘It’s an idea. But giving unproven mortals weapons and sending them out is not a chance I’m willing to take.’

Crius kept his eyes on Betre, who stared back at him. Her eyes burned with hate, and when he looked at them he could remember blood and broken teeth, so clearly. ‘I understand, sergeant. But I believe she would help us, if she could.’

Liber stopped his examination of the tunnel and turned to Crius. ‘You do. And it may be true.’ He pointed to the pile of weapons that they had taken from the Sons of Horus. ‘Take what you think they can handle and go with them. Milon and I will stop the traitors, but they’ll try to force their way past us, somehow. Disrupt that, slow them. We must give Aelia and Darrio the time they need to get back and tell the others.’

Go off with the mortals, and leave Liber and Milon to fight the traitors without him? It wasn’t what Crius had meant, but… He looked at Betre, staring at him, eyes hungry for blood. He did believe what he’d said. Crius went to the weapons, pulled out a bolter, a bolt pistol, two combat knives and some smoke grenades, putting them in a pack.

‘Are those for us?’ Betre asked.

‘Take me to these traitors and yes,’ he said, and she nodded sharply, hands curling into fists.

‘Useless mortals,’ Milon said. ‘If they don’t turn on us, they’ll kill themselves with those weapons before they kill any of the Sons.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Liber. ‘But the best defence requires multiple walls. Some as hard as our armour. Others…’ He looked at Betre, standing there with Nym crouched beside her. ‘…as soft as flesh and brittle as bone.’

The mortals moved easily down the narrow passage ahead of Crius, Nym leading, silent and sure on her bare feet, Betre and Kryt close behind. Crius… did not move as easily. Twisted sideways, his armoured shoulders still barely fit between the stone sides, and he was constantly ducking his head to clear stone outcrops and dead lumens. More dust and darkness, and he hated this place even more.

Ahead, Nym stopped beside a grate set in the floor, peering down. She waved to Betre to join her, the girl and the woman seeming to share their own form of gesture-speak. Crius hadn’t heard Nym utter a sound other than a few soft growls. When Crius reached the grate, the mortals were all staring through it at a long drop into darkness, with rusted steel staples sticking out from the raw stone as a crude ladder. Then they looked at him.

‘Will he fit down that?’ Kryt asked.

‘Maybe,’ said Betre. ‘Definitely if he takes off that armour.’

‘No,’ Crius said, and the woman flashed a smile at him, small and hard.

‘Didn’t think.’

Kryt grasped the steel grate, straining to pull it up, and after watching him struggle, Crius reached out and flipped it out of the way. Nym dived through the opening, climbing down.

‘We’re almost there,’ Betre said as she waved Kryt to follow. ‘The tunnel at the bottom winds back up and meets the tunnel where we left your other golds. We’ll be behind those greens, when they get there. Then you’ll give us the guns, yeah?’

Crius looked at her. Blood and teeth. Hate and fear. He was putting a lot on a memory, a feeling of what it had been like to be a mortal like her once, long ago. But there was nothing else now. ‘Go,’ he said, and waited until she’d disappeared into the darkness before he started.

The steel staples groaned under his weight, bending in his grip. The shaft’s sides scraped against the yellow shoulders of his armour, biting impotently at the ceramite. He moved slow, making sure not to get stuck. Halfway down, he stopped, listening closely. He could hear the low groan of the steel that made the crude ladder, the sound of Kryt and Betre climbing down below him. But under those noises was something quieter, something more menacing. An almost imperceptible noise of cracking in the stone; a low, subsonic groan as the rock walls shifted and buckled. Across the rough rock wall, cracks were appearing, thin as hairs, unseeable except to Crius’ gene-forged eyes. They were spreading, jagged lightning lines, and in his fingers he could feel the vibrations as they grew.

‘Betre! Get out!’ That was all the time he had, then the noise suddenly swelled, stone popping like bolter shots as the cracks began to break open. Crius could see a huge slab of rock starting to shear away, and he knew that it would smash down on the mortals below, killing them. With a snarl he pushed himself back, using the narrowness of the shaft as an advantage as he jammed his back against the far wall. Bracing himself, he pressed his gauntleted hands into the chunk of stone that was trying to slide free. It pushed against him, trying to crush him aside so it could fall, but the strength of his armour, his arms and his back were enough, just enough. He locked his teeth, muscles straining, holding the tunnel together as the mortals beneath him dropped the last bit of the way then scrambled out.

When they were clear, Crius took a breath, shifted his shoulders, and moved his hands, digging armoured fingers into the walls, slowing his slide as the stone carried him down to smash into the tunnel below. He hit the ground, moving to keep the huge stone from catching him as it crashed down, but the rubble it carried behind fell like a storm, burying him in darkness.

‘This is our chance! We can go!’

Kryt’s voice. Crius blinked, but there was nothing but black. He tasted dust and the metallic tang of his own blood.

‘Shut up. We have to dig him out!’

Betre. Crius tried to shift, but the stone had him pinned. He closed his eyes, listening to his body. While below his armour he was uninjured, the stone had gashed his unprotected head. But his gene-seed had made him strong, strong enough to shrug off a blow that would have crushed a mortal’s skull.

‘To get the weapons?’ Kryt asked.

‘To get him, damn you!’ Betre answered. ‘We can’t kill those greens without him!’

‘Can we kill ’em with him?’ Kryt snapped back. ‘Why we doing this, Betre?’

‘Because when that green locked that collar around my throat, I swore I’d see him dead, Kryt. And I keep my killing promises. Always.’

‘Your promise gonna get us all killed,’ Kryt muttered.

Crius could hear scrabbling at the stone that covered him, and so he moved slow, warning Betre before he jerked himself out of the rubble. She cursed and scrambled back as he pulled himself free. Blinking the grit from his eyes, he could see Kryt and Betre staring at him, Nym silently lurking behind.

Betre looked at him. ‘You good, gold?’

‘I am an Imperial Fist. We are the stone men of the empire.’ Crius brushed the dust from his armour. ‘We are not so easily broken.’

‘Good,’ she said, her voice vicious. ‘Then let’s go kill those greens.’

The Sons of Horus were already there.

The tunnel shook around them, and a roar echoed down its stone throat. Grenade, Crius thought. The explosion was followed by the crack of bolters, mixed in with the thunderous rattle of one heavy bolter, then another, followed by the roar of Milon’s flamer.

‘Liber is holding the Sons back,’ he said. He looked down the narrow passage they were in. It twisted, blocking his view, but he could see flashes of light reflected off the walls as bolters fired. ‘I need…’ He needed to charge in, to smash into the enemy that was so close. But he had no idea how they were placed. A blind charge would probably result in all of them dying, and his death must be paid for with traitors’ blood. ‘I need to see.’

‘They’ll see you, gold.’ Betre pointed at Nym. ‘Send her.’

‘They’ll see her,’ Crius said.

‘Nym? In the middle of a fight?’ Betre shook her head. ‘Lift her up.’ Betre pointed to the top of the tunnel, where old conduits ran between broken and flickering lumens.

Crius frowned at the child and Nym frowned back, clearly unhappy at the idea of getting within his reach. But Betre made an impatient gesture and Nym slid reluctantly close. Crius caught her by the back of her dirty shirt and tossed her up. She caught the conduits easily, her fingers and toes wrapping around them, strong and strangely jointed. They let her hang upside down from the top of the tunnel as she scrambled silently away, and when her grip slipped, something flicked out of her mouth. Her tongue, long as her forearm, wrapped around a lumen and helped the girl along as she skittered away.

‘Mutant,’ Crius said, watching her go. His hand was on his bolter.

‘We’ll use anyone that helps us down here,’ Betre said. ‘Speaking of…’ She looked at the bag slung over Crius’ shoulders. He looked back at her, then nodded. Whatever else, Betre’s hate had proven itself. He pulled the weapons from the bag, handed a blade to each, the bolter to Kryt and the bolt pistol to Betre. She frowned at the smaller weapon, still huge in her hands.

‘The kick will break your arms if you hold it wrong,’ Crius said. ‘Brace.’

She nodded, and behind her thunder rolled, another grenade going off. Crius pulled his bolter out, desperate to move. But he waited, waited for that little mutant to come back. If she was coming back…

When she did, she was low, slipping along the floor like a shadow, and Crius barely kept himself from shooting her. Betre saw his gun shift and caught sight of the girl. Nym had frozen against the wall, glaring poison at Crius until he lowered his bolter. Then she slipped over to Betre, silent. He could believe, watching her, that she’d been unseen.

Betre crouched with the girl, and the two whispered and moved their hands. ‘Your golds still hold their tunnel,’ Betre said. ‘They’ve killed one of the greens. Two are firing at them with big guns, keeping them in place while the others move closer.’

Pinning them down with heavy bolters while Milon kept them back with his flamer. An uneasy balance that wouldn’t hold long. The Sons would come up with some way around the veterans, or just rush forward, pay the cost, and break through. So what could Crius and these mortals do to shift that balance?

‘Where were they?’ he asked, and Betre drew a rough sketch in the dust of the passage floor, based on what Nym was telling her. Crius stared at the crude map, trying to think of a plan, until Betre added a dot among the crosses that represented the Sons of Horus. ‘What is that?’

‘Nym doesn’t know,’ Betre said. ‘A block, like a pack, but with lights. The greens set it on the floor behind them.’

A pack. With lights. ‘Yellow, striped with red?’ he asked.

‘Green, striped with red,’ Betre answered, after talking with the girl. Of course. Green, because it was the Sons’ equipment. But the red warning was the same.

‘A demolition charge,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ Betre asked.

‘That’s how we kill them all.’ Crius looked over the sketch, the tactical lessons burned in his brain snapping into place. ‘It’s a bomb, used to seal these tunnels. If the lights on it are flashing, they’ve activated it. Just in case there were more Imperial Fists ready to pour down that tunnel.’ He pulled out the smoke grenades he’d brought. ‘Can Nym get close enough to throw these into the centre of those traitors?’

‘The greens?’ Betre looked at the girl, who nodded.

‘Right,’ said Crius. Relying on a mutant… We’ll use anyone that helps us down here. ‘She throws them in and blinds the Sons of Horus. We come in after, you two firing into the sides, confusing them as I charge for-ward. To here.’ He tapped the dot marking the demolition charge. ‘Armed, all I have to do is hit the red button. With no timer set it’ll blow on a short delay, like a grenade, and bring that tunnel down on all of those traitors.’

‘And you,’ said Betre.

‘Nine for one,’ Crius said. ‘That’s a price I’ll pay.’

She looked at him, then nodded. ‘When?’

‘Now. Before they move.’ He handed the grenades to the girl, then grabbed her and tossed her up to the conduits. ‘Get in place,’ he said. ‘We’ll follow soon. When they see us and start to fire, drop the grenades.’ She nodded, and her too-long tongue swept from her mouth, wrapping around the grenades and holding them as she scrambled away.

Crius began a countdown in his head, calculating how long he could give Nym. Waiting beside him, Betre spoke.

‘Why do you trust me?’

‘I don’t,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘But I was a ganger once. Long ago and far away. I remember what it was like to be caught by those who are stronger, more powerful. I remember that helplessness. I remember that hate. I trust that.’

She laughed, a sound like broken glass. ‘Fear and hate. That’s a trust that will not break.’ She looked at him. ‘Ganger once, ganger forever. You just got a better gang now, gold.’

Crius nodded as the countdown in his head ended. ‘Go.’ He started forward, pacing down the tunnel, the mortals behind. He rounded one curve, another, and then the tunnel opened out into the wider mineshaft. There were the Sons of Horus, arrayed much as Nym had said, and he raised his bolter and began to fire.

‘For the primarch, I kill!’ he roared, and the traitors turned, armour sparking as his bolts caught them, and past them he could see the demolition charge on the ground, still flashing. They raised their guns and began to fire back, and with two sharp cracks Nym’s grenades went off and smoke filled the passage, hiding traitors and charge alike.

It didn’t matter. Crius blazed a series of shots through the smoke, aiming where the traitors had been. On one side Betre had thrown herself down, below the shots pouring out of the smoke, and was bracing the pistol against the stone floor as she fired, barely holding it in place. On the other side Kryt was shouting as he raised the bolter Crius had handed to him. He fired once, without bracing, and the recoil sent him flying back. He pulled himself up, cursing, but before he could raise the gun again, a bolt came screaming out of the smoke and caught the ganger in the chest. There was a muffled explosion, and for a moment there were just Kryt’s legs, standing below a cloud of red; then they were falling to the floor.

Crius barely registered the man’s death. His bolter was blazing as he charged the wall of smoke, heading straight for the demolition charge…

And then a huge shape crashed out of the smoke and smashed into him.

The Son of Horus slammed him down, the impact knocking Crius’ bolter away. The traitor rolled, trying to aim his bolter at Crius, who grabbed the Son’s hand with both of his, keeping the muzzle of the weapon pointed away. But the traitor’s other hand scrabbled across his armour and found his face. Ceramite-covered fingers dug into Crius’ skin, and Crius had to pull a hand away from the fight over the bolter so that he could grab the gauntlet that was trying to wrench his face free.

‘Gold!’ Betre’s shout was almost lost in the sound of bolters, but Crius saw her through the fingers of the traitor as she pelted past, throwing the combat blade he’d given her at him, just before she vanished into the smoke.

The blade clanged against his armour, and he let go of the Son’s hand. He could feel the pain as the traitor’s fingers dug in, but he found the hilt of the knife. With a roar, he rolled, dragging the Son of Horus with him, exposing the space beneath the traitor’s arm. Crius slammed the blade there, where he knew the armour was thin. He felt the crack of ceramite, and then the crunch as he drove through skin and muscle and bone. The Son thrashed below him, the arm holding the gun going limp as the blade severed nerves and blood vessels. But the traitor’s other hand closed harder on Crius’ face, and Crius could feel his cheekbone snap as his eyes began to dim. But he had had enough of darkness, and this was not the death he wanted.

Crius pulled the bolter from the Son’s weakened hand, jammed the weapon under the chin of the traitor, and fired.

For a moment the dead Son of Horus’ hand tightened in spasm, almost splitting Crius’ skull, but then it released and fell. With a grunt, the Imperial Fist kicked the body away from him and stood, knife in one hand, bolter in the other. The cloud of smoke still seethed in front of him, bolter rounds chattering through it, lit to a hellish red by flamer fire.

‘For the Legion!’ he shouted, and charged forward into that hell. The smoke was thinning, and he searched the acrid haze for the demolition charge. Through the chaos of shadows and muzzle flashes he saw nothing, nothing, until… There. A gleam of red, down near the floor. The charge’s blinking lights. But standing over it was a shadow, a hulking figure in green armour. No. Two shadows.

Despite the keenness of his eyes, the smoke and confusion almost hid her. But Crius could see that the Son of Horus was holding something up with one arm, a shape that flailed helplessly in his armoured grip. Betre. Crius couldn’t make out her face, but in a muzzle flash he caught the grey of her hair. The Son of Horus was raising his other hand, driving the muzzle of his bolter into Betre’s belly. When he pulled the trigger, the ganger would be ripped in half.

Without thinking, Crius raised his gun and fired, snapping off a shot that scraped a line across the sergeant’s insignia painted on the heavy ceramite of the Son’s shoulder plate. The traitor threw Betre down, spinning to face Crius, and muzzles blazed as they opened fire at each other. Crius caught the Son in the chest, staggering him, but one of the traitor’s bolts smashed into his belly, the force of its explosion knocking Crius onto his back. He rolled, coming up on one knee, but his bolter was a twisted ruin in his hand, shattered by a piece of shrapnel.

The Son was moving towards him, eyes glowing as he aimed his heavy gun at Crius’ head. ‘A stone man, dying in the dark and the dust.’

Crius threw aside the broken bolter. ‘A traitor.’ He held up his blade. ‘Breaker of oaths, can you face a man that keeps his promises?’

The Son tilted his helmet, finger tightening on his trigger. But behind him, something moved. A figure on the ground, crawling painfully forwards, her hand reaching out for the red button on the demolition charge. ‘Or a woman?’

The traitor paused, confused, and in that moment Betre’s fingers found the button and pressed it with a click. That tiny noise was enough to grab the Son’s attention. The green-armoured figure looked back, and then spun, turning and driving forwards, flinging Betre out of the way. The woman landed in a heap, but Crius could see her smile, vicious as a predator. Then she was gone, as the universe flashed into thunder and light.

When the light died and the thunder faded, Crius came back, the stones settling around him. He’d been blown back into the passage. The cavern was gone, obliterated. Rubble lay piled halfway to his knees, and he had to pull his legs out to stand.

Crius stared at the stone, the explosion still ringing in his head. Across from him a green ceramite shoulder plate was embedded in the stone wall, the sergeant’s mark on it barely visible. ‘Betre,’ he muttered, shaking his head, clearing it.

The shadows shifted beside him and he spun, the blade still in his hand. Nym looked back at him. Then she stared at the pile of stone.

‘Betre,’ she whispered.

Crius nodded, feeling the blood on his face from a dozen cuts. ‘For the Legion, she triumphed.’

The mutant girl shook her head, growling denial, eyes shining with tears.

‘I know why she did what she did,’ Crius said. ‘The promise she made. But in the end, her hate served the Legion, and the Emperor. This Imperial Fist will remember her name. So should you.’ Crius took the knife that Betre had thrown him and presented it hilt-first to the girl. Nym looked at him warily, then snatched it away, the weight dragging her arms down. But she clutched the blade to her as she turned and disappeared into the darkness of the tunnels, leaving Crius alone in the dark with the settling dust and the dead.

THE FLESH HARVEST

NICHOLAS WOLF

‘We’re all going to die down here.’

I barely glanced up from my battered data-slate. The servo-skull’s transponder signal was weak, and growing weaker the deeper we descended into the suffocating darkness of the Zone Mortalis. Same with the auspex. ‘Your reservations were noted back at the Lair.’

Shikhar grunted deep in her throat. ‘Noted, and ignored,’ my lieutenant groused. I heard the squeal of her gloved hands strangling the stock of her long-las. ‘If you hadn’t already traded all our plunder to that damned Sixty-Six…’

I rolled my eyes that I was having this argument again, but I chose not to let my choler rise: I enjoyed provoking my lieutenant from time to time, but I knew not to antagonise Shi when she was really angry, and damn it if she wasn’t already close to shooting me in the back.

‘Theta-Gamma Sixty-Six is a reputable broker of information,’ I lied, going back to my data-slate, pinging the last known coordinates of 66’s lost servo-skull. There was, in truth, nothing about the disgraced Mechanicum adept that could’ve been considered reputable, but I’d bought his silence with more than mere loot. ‘And, as you said, his discretion has already been rewarded. So rather than grouse, why don’t you trust me for a change? Have I ever steered us wrong?’

She growled again. Even behind her rubberised rebreather mask I could hear her grinding her metal-capped teeth. ‘By the Emperor, if you…’

Her words trailed off.

By the Emperor.

It was strange how quickly the familiar affectation had fallen from Cthonian tongues. I, Ikharios Brehker, boss of the Kraton Reapers, rarely wasted a thought on the Emperor. Despite Imperial doctrine that He wasn’t divine, there were growing cults that preached He was a god, but whatever He was, I felt nothing beyond the distant reverence mortals pay to a distant ruler on a distant throne on a distant world.

Here, in the sweaty, lightless depths of Cthonia’s corpse-choked murder-tunnels, where humanity clung doggedly to a dying world barely held together by the bones of ancient machinery, I had more important things to worry about – things like whether or not I was going to wake up with a knife sliding across my throat, or who I was going to have to kill for my next meal.

‘Or whatever devilry keeps pinging on the damned auspex,’ I grumbled to myself as red dots appeared, vanished, and appeared again.

No, something had changed though; I knew it in my gut. The affairs of the galaxy drizzled into the Cthonian underhive like blood through an offal grate, yet something unmistakably dire had transpired out there among the stars. Rumours abounded. The Great Crusade had stopped, or been lost, or turned inwards. The armies of demigods had been slaughtered, or were slaughtering each other, or neither, maybe. Or both?

The shift in Cthonia’s bloody rhythm had been subtle at first, a changing of ceramite-clad guardians from the familiar livery of the Sons of Horus to the saffron of the Imperial Fists, and an unspoken threat not to get in their way. Then came oppressive new protocols and curfews from these unfamiliar Astartes, who might or might not have been enemies of the Cthonians, enforced at the barrel of a bolter. Then there’d been abrupt, violent skirmishes between the Fists and the Sons that’d left whole sections of Lupercal’s Gate devastated.

Or worse, if the rumours about the Zone Mortalis are true.

Then, suddenly, there’d been an invasion from the stars, culminating in Horus’ legendary space fortress tumbling from the sky, triggering earthquakes and cave-ins across half the continent. No one in the underhive could say for certain who was winning and who was losing, or even who was on whose side, but with the inevitability of an avalanche, the daily struggle for survival went from brutal to downright desperate. Immortals, some in the familiar livery of the Sons of Horus, some in the yellow of the Fists, and others I’d never seen before, had become embroiled in a bitter fight to harvest Cthonia’s hale youth to fuel their war effort.

Anyone who opposed the Immortals, regardless of their livery, was slaughtered.

The darkness of the Zone Mortalis was becoming deeper around us, overwhelming the ruddy glow of yawning lava vents and the anaemic light of the random lumens we passed. I switched on the lumen taped to my gun, but strangely the beam didn’t pierce the gloom.

‘We’re getting close,’ I mumbled over the makeshift one-way vox-net I’d cobbled together, glancing at the data-slate. Shikhar clicked in reply, the only return communication I’d been able to engineer with my limited tools and knowledge. ‘I think,’ I added, but only to myself.

What the devil is that horrid smell? It’s getting through my damned rebreather.

Once the Immortals’ flesh harvest had begun, I’d been keen to keep as far away from them as possible. Many Cthonians would charge into the most brutal blood games they could find to gain the attention of a Legion’s mystic gene-wrights, but I had no desire to have my body twisted by arcane techno-sorcery, only to be hurled into the meat grinder for the Emperor, or Horus, or anyone else.

My life was my own, and I’d be a dead man before I ever let anyone put fetters around my neck.

Cthonia was both a carcass to be pillaged and a ladder to be climbed. Me and the Kraton Reapers, my ragged mob of half-starved murderers, cut-throats and unfortunates, we had more immediate concerns than which army of demigods got to plant their flag on this barren, worthless hunk of brutal rock while we murdered each other for scraps of food and ammunition.

But hearing Shikhar’s words.

By the Emperor.

It made me feel distinctly uneasy. Queasy even, but I suspected that had more to do with the unnatural shadows gathering at the edges of my vision: it’d been a long time since I’d eaten, and I doubted there was anything left in my stomach to expel.

Chime.

The damned auspex chimed again, dragging me back to the present. I snatched the malfunctioning gadget and grudgingly checked it, knowing what I’d find. Lurking beyond the several hundred crimson dots representing the whole of the Kraton Reapers were anomalous contacts that refused to show themselves. Or maybe there weren’t. But I wasn’t worried about Cthonians waiting in the shadows to slit my throat.

I was worried the other rumours I’d heard might be true.

Ultimately I chose to ignore Shikhar’s mention of the Emperor. ‘Trust me, Shi, I understand the risk I’ve taken bringing us all down here, truly,’ I whispered, even though, the deeper we descended into the Zone Mortalis, the less I believed it. ‘But I have a plan, and if we stick to it we’re going to have the weapons and tech to slaughter anyone that stands against the Reapers.’

I could hear my lieutenant’s bionic eye angrily whirring as she scowled at me. ‘I think your plan is going to get us all killed horribly,’ Shikhar grumbled. ‘But you already knew that.’

‘And yet here you are, in the most dangerous caverns in the cursed rock of Cthonia, following me into the Zone Mortalis.’ I smiled behind my rebreather, never letting my gallows humour reach my eyes.

Shikhar removed her rebreather and spat on the jagged rock beneath our feet. ‘I’m following you for the Vault, Ikharios,’ she snarled back.

I grinned. Despite her bluster, Shikhar Deadeye and I had fought side by side, and saved each other’s lives, enough times to know she was a Reaper to the bone.

There hadn’t been many a night, since I could remember, that I hadn’t gone to sleep without a blade clutched in my hand. On the nights I’d fallen asleep next to Shi, though, I’d merely kept my knife close.

As I led the winding column of Kraton Reapers deeper into the sweating, sulphur-choked catacombs of the Zone Mortalis, I felt my mind drift, inexorably, back to the reason I’d armoured and armed my gang with the best weapons at our disposal and marched us to this forsaken place: the Vault.

After the crashing orbital fortress nearly cracked the hemisphere in half, the rumours had started. Something had been unearthed, deep in Cthonia’s lifeless heart, where the air was poison and darkness ate light. Something ancient.

I’d immediately gone to 66, not because I trusted the ex-Mechanicum menial more than any other opportunistic cut-throat that would barter for information, but because the Immortals’ war had seen all my preferred data-brokers conscripted or killed. The clattering, half-machine ghoul, stinking of one synthetic chemical stimulant or another, had revealed that he’d found a vault, or a laboratory, or something, likely concealed by a cave-in at some point in Cthonia’s ancient past.

I’d paid little attention to 66’s overwrought rambling about something called the Quest for Knowledge, or the Omnissiah, whatever or whoever that was. I’d only cared about one thing: that it was powerful enough to cement the Kraton Reapers atop the bloody hierarchy of Cthonia’s murder-tunnels.

I’d been reluctant, at first, to part with the sum total of the Reapers’ blood-plunder – except our weapons and armour – in exchange for 66’s information, but in the back of my mind I’d known the truth: without some miraculous hoard of loot and weapons falling into my lap, my gang would forever be scrounging in the grimy dregs of Cthonia’s tunnel-hives, murdering other insignificant miscreants for just enough scraps of meat to keep from starving, and enough bullets to keep our guns loaded for the next fight.

So, knowing the risk I was taking, I’d concluded my business with Theta-Gamma 66, armed with the last known coordinates of the servo-skull he’d used to map the route to the Vault, and assurances that he wouldn’t be selling his information to anyone else.

I glanced down at the data-slate again and wiped filmy grime from the cracked screen. This deep in Cthonia’s bedrock, the sweltering air was thick with poisonous gases and pulverised rock that never truly settled, cloaking all within it in a suffocating coat of toxic filth.

‘How much further?’ Shikhar asked.

‘Not far now,’ I voxed to the gang. Only Shikhar clicked in reply. ‘Sixty-Six’s servo-skull should be just through this tunnel.’

Over the strange, subterranean rumbling of the Zone Mortalis I heard the familiar sound of boltguns being racked, lasweapons buzzing, and other, more esoteric sounds of our more exotic weapons coming to life. I activated the combustion relay of my volkite charger, my most prized possession. Despite the sweating heat of the caverns I felt a chill run down my spine: there was another sound, lurking on the edges of my hearing, that seemed… wrong. Like the chittering of insects, or rasping whispers, or the gurgling of a great gut.

If the rumours are true…

Venturing into the Zone Mortalis, even in more certain times, was to court disaster. There were a thousand ways to die in the lightless depths of Cthonia’s heart, and I’d been lucky to have only lost a dozen Reapers since we’d entered two days ago. But in this time of war, with rumours swirling that some unnamed something had taken the Zone Mortalis as its home, and devoured all who ventured into the darkness…

Well, only a fool would’ve thought to enter.

So what does that make me?

I shot a quick glance at Shikhar, but I couldn’t tell from her eyes whether she was angry or frightened. I hadn’t survived twenty-four Terran-standard years in the blood-drenched tunnels of Cthonia by second-guessing myself, but I was suddenly starting to think my lieutenant had been right to caution against entering the Zone.

Ahead, the narrow tunnel finally opened into a shallow basin, ringed with sweating stalagmites that looked altogether too much like the fangs of some rotten, spiteful beast. There, glinting in the scant light of our lumens, I spied 66’s downed servo-skull.

Shikhar whistled softly as she came to my side. ‘By the Em…’ She paused. ‘So, that old cyborg wasn’t lying after all.’

I scoffed at the suggestion. ‘You think I’d get tricked so easily?’

She didn’t respond, but I knew without looking the face she was making behind her rebreather. I would’ve grinned, but my mouth had suddenly gone dry as my heartbeat quickened.

Chime.

Again the auspex pinged a warning, this time more urgently. I stifled a growl. The damned thing barely functioned in the hive-tunnels beneath Lupercal’s Gate, but this deep beneath Cthonia’s surface it was completely useless. Again I smeared grime away, to make sure I was seeing properly. The auspex was now tagging hundreds of contacts surrounding the Reapers, then none, then only a few, then thousands. I aimed my lumen into the darkness below: the beam of light seemed to be eaten by the shadow, revealing nothing.

I glanced down at the basin again. The feeling that I was unwittingly walking into the belly of some hungering monster coiled in my gut. ‘I’m going in,’ I voxed to the Reapers, Shikhar most of all. ‘Remember the plan.’

Guns drawn, scanning the encroaching darkness for enemies, I climbed down into the basin, followed by half of my warriors, leaving the other half ensconced in the shadows with Shikhar.

The Kraton Reapers, small in comparison to most other gangs, rarely marched in such numbers, even for our bloodiest raids and flesh harvests. Yet somehow, despite being surrounded by two hundred of my best killers, I felt fear gripping my heart.

I could tell I wasn’t the only one feeling so. I might not have been able to earn the fealty of the underhive’s most notorious warriors and murderers as some larger gangs could, but the Kraton Reapers were still Cthonian underhivers, and each one of us stared into death’s maw every time we wanted to fill our bellies: nothing should’ve frightened us. And yet, as we approached the crashed servo-skull, and the shadows guzzled our lumen beams, and the ground squelched beneath our feet as rock inexplicably became something else, and the auspex was desperately chiming in my pocket, I was terrified.

‘Drop your weapons, Ikharios.’

I almost opened fire, but thankfully I was able to wrangle my adrenaline-fuelled reflex to aim and shoot. I recognised that phlegmy growl before the speaker stalked from behind a sweating stalactite on wheezing bionic legs: shooting would be pointless.

Kholkhar the Skulltaker, boss of the Abrax Scourge.

The rival gang leader was clad in a patchwork suit of armour, half of it taken from the corpses of Immortals, by his own boasting. His armour was festooned with chains, hooks and, true to his sobriquet, severed heads. I was suddenly very aware that my own armour, cobbled together from old promethium drums and whatever scraps of tech I could scavenge to make it function, looked trifling by comparison. In Kholkhar’s hands was a wide-mouthed ripper gun, tusked with serrated gutting-blades.

Chime, chime, chime went the auspex.

The burly lord of the Scourge loped into the open, gun trained on my head, flanked by dozens and dozens and dozens of his killers, at least equal to the number of Reapers at my side. Belatedly I held up my hand to keep Shikhar and her contingent from opening fire, but thankfully she knew better than to start shooting when the enemy had their guns on me. More importantly, I had no idea how many of the damned Scourge surrounded us. Her position above might have been ambushed too, and I’d have no way of knowing.

I refused to drop my gun, if only to not appear weak, but I slowly lowered the barrel of my volkite charger so Kholkhar didn’t shoot me dead. ‘What a coincidence, seeing you down here,’ I said casually.

Chime. Chime, chime. Chime.

Kholkhar’s scarred face was unreadable behind his skull-mouthed rebreather, but I knew he wasn’t smiling. ‘I said drop your weapon, Ikharios. We’ve got you surrounded.’

‘You’ve got me surrounded, but the Kraton Reapers have you surrounded,’ I bluffed. Well, I didn’t know if I was bluffing or not, but it was my best chance not to be shot dead in the next few seconds. I cast a fleeting glance towards 66’s servo-skull, grinning just beyond my reach.

Kholkhar followed my gaze. He took a clanking step towards me, placing himself between me and my map to the Vault, and pressed the barrel of his ripper gun under my chin. Its blade nicked my cheek deep enough to draw blood.

‘You’re either very brave or very stupid to lie to me, boy,’ he growled. ‘And knowing you, it’s the latter. I told you to drop your weapons. The only reason I told you twice is because I don’t want to waste the ammunition, but I’ll have no problem emptying my magazine before I tell you a third time.’

I paused.

He thinks I’m lying to him.

He doesn’t know about Shi.

But I don’t know how outnumbered I truly am.

I ultimately dropped my weapon, trusting my lieutenant would know what to do when the time came. My Reapers grudgingly did the same.

Chime. Chime. Chime. Chime.

I could tell the old Skulltaker was sneering beneath his rebreather. ‘You’re a long way from the underhive, boy.’

‘As are you,’ I replied. ‘Yet here we are. Tell me what you want. Or would you rather sit here wasting time until you croak from old age?’

A scream echoed in the distance. We all jumped, even old Kholkhar. ‘Take care of it,’ he snarled to some of the Scourge, who melted away into the darkness to investigate.

Chime. Chime. Chime. Chime. Chime.

‘You know what I wa–’

Another scream. And another. These ones closer.

‘I said take care of it!’ the Skulltaker roared. The Scourge didn’t move at first, but then a few turned and cautiously stepped beyond the basin. ‘As I said, you kn–’

Screams. Bloody, horrible screams. Close.

CHIME, CHIME, CHIME, CHIME, CHIME.

‘Damnation, will you turn that thing off!’ Kholkhar bellowed.

Slowly, making sure not to get my head blasted off, I deliberately drew my auspex from my pocket. Even though the screen was once again smeared with rock dust, I could tell the entire display was glowing blood-red with threats.

CHIME! CHIME! CHIME! CHIME! CHIME! CHIME! CHIME!

As one, both Kraton Reapers and Abrax Scourge turned our eyes to the surrounding darkness, as the sound of screams and that hideous chittering swelled like a blast wave. The Reapers quickly readied their weapons and the Scourge did nothing to stop them. Even Kholkhar turned and scowled into the darkness, growling like a feral beast.

Something vaguely human and yet utterly not emerged from the unnatural shadows, holding a dripping human head in its hands.

‘Shi, remember the second part of the plan?’ I voxed quietly. ‘Now is the time.’

Click.

The sinuous man-thing threw back its head and screamed. Somehow, even though it was wearing a corroded rebreather mask, its grating howl was loud enough to drive me to my knees.

Then the horde attacked.

Out of the unnatural darkness they came in a solid wall of pale, malnourished, diseased, warped, howling flesh. I saw human faces twisted into bestial maws, limbs mutated into animal talons, and every scrap of exposed skin carved into infected murals of suffering. Some carried guns or blades in their scabrous claws, but most charged us with nothing but their splintered fingernails and hideous hunger.

As one the Reapers and the Scourge opened fire.

Screaming, not with the joy of battle-lust but the instinctual shout that keeps a man’s voice from becoming a terrified shriek, I unleashed my volkite charger. The weapon whirred in my trembling fists before unleashing a bolt of lambent energy so hot I felt the flesh of my hands searing. Las-bolts and energy rays and bolter shells chewed the front line of freaks into scorched mulch, but the horde charged on, gleefully trampling the dead and dying, screaming in what sounded like ecstasy. Some of the creatures returned fire. One by one I saw Reapers and Scourge collapse clutching spurting wounds or slumping with heads blasted from their shoulders. The hammer of our fusillade bought us only seconds before the wave of our enemies crashed into us.

I’ve seen twenty-four Terran-standard years, or so I’d been told, and I’d been in enough blood-brawls to have forgotten most of the men and women I’d killed with my blade. But nothing I’d ever seen prepared me for the lunatic, animal ferocity that spurred these debased freaks.

The Scourge, standing on the periphery of the basin, reached for their blades, but half of them were engulfed in a frantic tide of inhuman flesh and teeth and claws and blades before they could draw them. I slung my charger and grabbed my melee weapon, a chainaxe I’d scavenged and modified from a long-dead Astartes. I thumbed the activation rune and the massive weapon hungrily roared to life, almost jumping out of my hands, as the first creature lunged at me. Blood spurted as the chugging weapon chewed through its barnacle-encrusted chest. Blinded by reeking gore I kicked the corpse free and swung again. My snarling weapon ripped through something else, and thankfully it elicited an inhuman shriek. Then another, and another, and another. My muscles screamed with every swing of the massive axe, but adrenaline gave me just enough manic strength to keep fighting.

The cacophony of shrieking monsters, roaring hive-gangers and hammering weapons became so loud that I almost couldn’t hear my own terrified screaming. Half-blind, I hacked through anything that laid its hands or claws or tentacles on me. All around me, Cthonians wailed in terror as horrific creatures ripped their bodies apart. Hardened killers pleaded as ghoulish monsters greedily dragged them down to gnaw their bodies to raw bones.

My armour cracked. Sparks gouted. My chugging chainaxe clogged with gristle and bone. I reached for my volkite charger but my bloody hands slipped on the handle. Pain flared everywhere at once as deranged monsters swarmed over me.

I’m going to die.

I’m going to die.

I’m going to die.

And then, suddenly, the noise slackened.

Cthonian war cries grew louder than the demented animal wailing of our attackers. The hammer of gunfire renewed to eclipse the freakish hissing and manic chanting. Frantic screeching became wounded mewling. I suddenly realised I couldn’t feel claws scrabbling at my ruined armour.

I wiped the gore out of my eyes and opened them.

The basin was a gruesome abattoir so ghastly I had to fight to keep from retching. The ground was choked with the dead and the dying, so thick with blood and entrails that it sucked at my boots as I staggered, trembling, through the carnage. Finally the coppery reek of rotten blood and the stink of ripped-open bowels was so strong that I had to remove my rebreather to keep from vomiting in it.

When my stomach was empty and I could regain my senses, my breath was stolen.

Hundreds of dead mutants lay butchered around me. Most of the Reapers and the Scourge lay in heaps beside them. Many of the corpses were so decimated that they were little more than shredded offal. How I wasn’t lying in chunks beside them was beyond my fathoming.

For the first time in my life I thought of thanking the Emperor, but the notion never reached my lips.

Fighting nausea, head buzzing, body aching, I joined the others in mechanically culling the wounded. Some of the freaks were so mutated I almost didn’t know where to jam my knife to kill them: warped faces leering from chests, inhuman bodies covered in scabrous armour. Most fought even though they were obviously doomed, hissing and howling. Some, seeming to awaken from a terrible dream, begged and pleaded to die.

I noticed many of the dead monsters bore Cthonian kill-gang tattoos, confirming the dark rumours about the Zone Mortalis that’d been gnawing at the shadows of the underhive, lurking in the nightmares that seemed to plague everyone.

The Sons of Horus and the Fists weren’t the only ones conducting a flesh harvest.

Shikhar was right. I never should’ve come down here.

And then, finally, silence, so loud it seemed like thunder, descended on us bloodied survivors, broken only by terrified panting and blood thundering in my ears as the adrenaline faded.

It was Kholkhar who shattered the stillness.

The Skulltaker roared and raged. The leader of the Scourge stomped through the morass of butchered bodies, shoulders hunched, hands twitching, kicking the dead out of the way with his wheezing legs. ‘Damnation! Where’s that damned servo-skull? Where’s the damned servo-skull?’

Reality dripped back into my frayed mind. Servo-skull. 66’s servo-skull. The map.

The Vault.

I shrugged off my ruined armour and immediately fell to my knees, rummaging through slimy guts and twitching corpses for 66’s lost drone. After several disgusting moments of scrounging through warm gore, I felt my hands close on a hard, angular object.

When I looked up, Kholkhar was standing over me. My hand was already on my sidearm, ready to draw. His bladed ripper gun wasn’t pointed at me, but it wasn’t pointed away from me either. I could see nothing but his eyes, but I knew he knew I could shoot him as fast as he could shoot me.

‘So,’ he growled finally. ‘I guess Sixty-Six swindled you too.’

I stopped, my retort dying on my tongue.

So, that’s your play?

‘It… appears so,’ I said slowly, apprehensively.

‘Alright, give it here,’ the Skulltaker growled, extending a gloved hand.

I motioned for my gang to lower their weapons, and Kholkhar did the same. Without taking my eyes off Kholkhar to glance around, I actually had no idea how many Reapers had survived. Or if Shi was still alive. The fact that I hadn’t been gunned down meant our numbers must’ve been even, otherwise I had no doubt the old Skulltaker would’ve blown my head off and slaughtered the remains of my gang.

I willingly handed 66’s servo-skull over to my rival, already knowing what would happen. He immediately started scrabbling at it, growing more and more frustrated as he tried to uncover how to extract the map. I barely understood such technology either, but that wasn’t what drew my scrutiny.

Finally, as the Skulltaker grew so irate he looked ready to smash the servo-skull, I drew an item from my pocket: Theta-Gamma 66’s personal geno-engram key.

‘Looking for this?’ I asked, trying to sound casual. I carefully watched Kholkhar’s eyes. If I’d been anything but a hardened killer I’d have been dead in a tunnel with a knife in my back long ago, but I’d always thought the reason I was still alive was my ability to read people: the Skulltaker’s raised eyebrows told me all that I needed to know.

You lying snake.

Rather than shoot me and take the key, Kholkhar handed the servo-skull to me. I socketed the unique geno-engram key into the case of the servo-skull. The strange device whirred and clicked as it recognised the mark of its owner. I extracted a strange metal cord from between its jaws and plugged it into my data-slate. The cracked screen scrabbled with static before resolving into a jangled set of coordinates leading to the Vault.

Now, with the map extracted, I half expected the Skulltaker to kill me. Instead, the boss of the Abrax Scourge extended his hand.

‘Alright, Ikharios – you’ve got the map, and I’ve got more guns than you,’ he growled. ‘I suggest a bargain.’

As the Scourge had borne the brunt of the horde’s assault, which gang actually had the most guns now was debatable – assuming Shikhar hadn’t been killed – but after that bloodbath I wanted as many guns as possible between me and those wretches.

‘I’m listening,’ I replied slowly, surprised that the old Skulltaker was proposing a truce rather than murdering me.

Kholkhar nodded. ‘I don’t know how many more of those… things are down here, but I do know we stand a better chance if we don’t waste ammo shooting each other. I say we kill anything that stands between us and our prize, and then split whatever plunder we find down the middle.’

Down the middle? So easily?

What I’d suspected ever since the Scourge had ambushed me became a sick but satisfying surety weighing in my gut. My gambit had paid off. I took off my glove, drew my knife, and slid the blade across my palm. ‘I don’t know what sadistic powers have ensnared Cthonia, or what the Immortals are fighting over, or anything else, but I do know a good idea when I hear it.’

Kholkhar the Skulltaker looked at my outstretched hand for a moment, then pulled off his glove, slit his own palm, and took my hand with his own. ‘Aye. The bargain is struck, Ikharios. Lead on.’

‘So be it,’ I said warily, wishing very much that I knew what’d happened to Shikhar and the rest of the Reapers. ‘By the way, we’ll want to harvest the dead for meat. The journey to the Vault is not short.’

The deeper we ventured into the Zone Mortalis the more I realised we were descending into some cursed other-place, somewhere that spitefully resented our presence.

I knew we’d been walking for days by how often we’d been forced to sleep, but my chronometer stubbornly ceased to measure time. My makeshift vox-net refused to respond, assuming there was anyone left to hear me. Darksome tunnels constricted to become claustrophobic. The fresh meat we’d cut from the dead at the basin rotted in our satchels. The greasy film that saturated the air grew thicker, and wetter, and darker, and fouler, until I frequently had to stop and scoop out gunk from my mask. I periodically glanced back at my killers, and saw many of them having to do the same just to keep from choking. Some simply collapsed where they stood, gagging on the darkness haunting the air despite their rebreathers.

I also noticed that none of the Scourge did the same. If anything, they seemed to be growing stronger. I couldn’t recall seeing any of them sleep.

The deeper we descended, the more oppressive the shadows became, and with them came the sensation of being watched. Followed. I had to fight to keep my breathing steady, if only to stop the Reapers from panicking, and Kholkhar from seeing my weakness.

But weakness haunted me. Fear gnawed at my bones. My auspex was finally snuffed out, and somehow its silence was worse than its chimed warnings. What I would’ve given to hear the click of Shikhar, just to know she was alive.

The rock beneath our feet became a fleshy carpet that sucked greedily at our boots. Chem-flares and lumens were devoured by the gloom, no matter how many we lit. Warriors died, snatched away by unseen things or tumbling into bottomless crevasses, leaving only their echoing screams as they were swallowed. But I remained fixated on the data-slate, parsing the map data taken from 66’s servo-skull, using it as a makeshift compass to deliver me to the Vault.

After more hours than I could fathom we arrived at the mapped coordinates.

Our claustrophobic pathway widened into a stony crevasse ringed with menacing daggers of rock. I scanned the surrounding area, seeing nothing: it brought me both relief and dread. As we drew nearer I spied my ingress. The entrance was little more than a narrow crack in the stone of Cthonia’s tormented bedrock, barely narrow enough for a servo-skull to skirt through.

‘We need explosives, something to blast a breach,’ I said.

Strangely, Kholkhar didn’t even seem to register my presence. His gaze was cast into some other-distance, looking not at me but behind me, as though we were being followed. Despite my instinct not to take my eyes off the old Skulltaker, I cast a quick glance over my shoulder, then another at the outcroppings above the entrance.

That I spied nothing meant my gambit would likely fail.

Kholkhar seemed to snap from his fugue trance and motioned to some of his gang. A handful of Scourge hulked forwards with rucksacks of melta-charges and placed them along the bases of the crack.

‘Careful with those,’ I whispered, mostly to myself. Anyone who lived to adulthood in the bowels of Cthonia developed an instinctual fear of cave-ins.

We pulled back and sheltered. The detonation was painfully loud, if only because I feared alerting more of the ghoulish subhuman horde.

Charger at the ready, I ensured that I was the first one through the ingress into the Vault. It stole the breath from my lungs.

I had spent my life amongst shambling hive-tunnels built from the mouldering bones of a star-empire that’d devoured Cthonia and left it to die in the void before the Emperor had ever dreamed of His Great Crusade, or so the legends went. I’d staked the Kraton Reapers’ hideout in the guts of a gigantic machine of unknown provenance that no more resembled Imperial technology than I resembled a grox. Much of the hive beneath Lupercal’s Gate was an amalgam of Terran ironworks buttressing strange macro-constructs large enough to hold a dead planet together. And yet none of the technological strangeness I had witnessed throughout my life in Cthonia’s chimeric depths could’ve prepared me for what I saw.

The Vault was pristine to the point of sterility, so much so that I felt guilty tracking dust and grime onto its enamelled floors. Indeed, the arched ceilings, the alabaster sconces, the painstaking machine-frescoes, all instilled the notion of some gigantic, otherworldly cathedral rendered in living marble, veined by pulsing, arcane circuitry, and lit by unseen lumens. The air smelled of… nothing. Perhaps the faintest actinic tang lingered in the air, but the sulphurous stink we carried with us rendered it moot. I unhooked my rebreather and inhaled the dry, stale air: it was the best breath I’d taken in my entire life.

But more entrancing than the air were the marvels that crouched and loomed and hung in every corner of the Vault. At my left were tanks filled with iridescent gases that spooled and billowed with the semblance of life. At my right was an enormous machine-thing, comprised of many silvered limbs engaged in a constant, complex motion that dizzied me more the longer I stared. Above me drifted luminous globes that seemed to sing in a language I’d never heard as they went about their inscrutable purposes, almost as though the aeons trapped underground had been mere moments.

But at the zenith of the Vault stood a wonder that defied my limited tongue to describe.

The towering object, held in stasis by two gargantuan shimmering discs, looked like an amorphous lump of gold that constantly shifted and rearranged itself in a gentle rhythm. I felt my weapon dropping and my mouth going slack as I approached it. Somehow it seemed to grow larger as I drew near, and not only because I was closer to it. I saw my hand reaching towards it unbidden, as though seeking the warmth of the fire when I was chilled to the bone.

‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’

Adrenal fire lanced through my veins. By the time I spun around, my volkite charger was trained on the owner of that impossibly deep, hideous voice.

Looming at the entrance to the Vault was one of the Immortals, but this demigod was unlike the Sons of Horus, or the Imperial Fists, or indeed any of the other legionaries I’d seen tearing Cthonia asunder. This one’s armour, rather than the green of distant seas or the yellow of burnished gold, was the red of curdled blood, rimmed with what I first thought was pale metal, but as it neared I realised was human bone. It wore a cloak of skinned faces, and at its back were censers of incense that stank of parched dirt and acrid vomit.

But its… his… face was what stole the breath from my chest, even as my finger tightened on the trigger.

His face was flat and broad, in the way that the gene-forged tended to be, browned by distant suns and tattooed in inscrutable runes. But there was something horribly wrong, something in the way the shadows clung too greedily to his face, how the angles perverted his visage into something that made my skin crawl.

Whatever this thing is, it’s not an Immortal. It’s something wearing an Immortal.

I motioned the Reapers to form a defensive perimeter around the newcomer, and Kholkhar and the Scourge followed suit. I kept the barrel of my volkite charger trained on the thing’s vaguely smiling face, even though it… he… made no motion to draw his weapons.

‘What is it?’ I asked, before realising that the question that had escaped my tongue was not the one I’d meant to voice.

The being smiled, as though quietly amused by my private confusion. He gestured towards the golden artefact with an outstretched hand. ‘It is many things, Ikharios Brehker, and much more than you could fathom. It is a gateway. It is a tomb. It is a weapon. It is a guardian. But more importantly, it is the deliverer of my apotheosis, by which I claim the promise of the Pantheon.’

The wet, predatory burr of his voice was so unnerving that I almost didn’t notice that he somehow knew my name.

‘You’re right,’ I finally managed, shaking off the greasy nausea building in my gut. ‘I don’t know what any of that means. What I do know is this plunder belongs to us, and my hundred guns mean you’re dead meat.’ I paused, desperately hoping my bluff might get this Immortal-thing to back down without a fight. ‘I’ve never tasted… whatever you are,’ I added, knowing it was a doomed effort. ‘But I look forward to it.’

The thing smiled. ‘Amusing. I’ve tasted Cthonian hearts, and I’ve found them to have a unique flavour, different from the other worlds I’ve scoured. Fearful, like rodents scurrying in the dark, fleeing a larger predator. Vicious, like vipers, willing to die striking if only to deliver their vengeful poison. Ambitious, in a way that I’ve never experienced vermin or serpents to be. But, as with all humans, there is also great, great foolishness.’

It was only then that I realised that the guns of the Abrax Scourge had slowly, imperceptibly, turned on my warriors.

‘I showed you the way to the Vault, my lord,’ the Skulltaker growled, bowing his head. ‘As promised.’

I shook my head. ‘Kholkhar, you disappoint me.’

‘Drop your gun, you insolent whelp,’ the Skulltaker snarled. I obeyed, having no other option. ‘You think this matters? You think the likes of us could’ve done anything with these… things?’ he spat, motioning to the unfathomable treasures of the Vault. ‘Cthonia is dead, if it ever was alive, and beyond this worthless rock there’s a new power forming. Something bigger than all the Immortals, and all their armies, and all their fleets, and even the damned Emperor.’ The Skulltaker pulled back the collar of his grimy armour, revealing a hideous blue scar that looked not unlike a writhing serpent. Following his lead the rest of the Scourge did the same, flaunting the brandings that had no doubt been applied by this bizarre being. ‘And now that I’ve led my lord here, I’ll be strong enough to slaughter anyone who stands before the Abrax Scourge.’

‘I’m at a loss for words,’ I said.

‘You’re in the presence of the divine, boy,’ Kholkhar sneered, gesturing towards the crimson Immortal-thing. ‘That’s natural.’

‘No, it’s not that,’ I said slowly, keeping a wary eye on the being. ‘I’m at a loss for words that you didn’t think I knew you were planning to betray me.’

‘What?’

‘You lied about getting information from Sixty-Six. I strangled that Mechanicum freak to death the moment he’d given me the location of the servo-skull, and then I looted his geno-engram key from his corpse,’ I sneered. ‘That’s how I knew you were working for someone else, someone who already knew about the Vault but just didn’t know where it was. My guess is you didn’t want to skulk back to your master empty-handed, so you followed me into the Zone Mortalis, waiting to ambush me the moment I’d found it. You just didn’t plan on losing most of your men before you got the map.’

Kholkhar glanced furtively at the being, then back at me, scowling. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the old Skulltaker growled.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the thing’s entertained smile begin to fade. Something dangerous slithered behind his eyes. I felt my skin crawl. ‘That’s why you agreed to an even bargain so readily,’ I said, mouth dry. ‘You didn’t care about splitting the plunder with me, you just cared about finding the Vault because you knew if you did, you wouldn’t have to.’

Kholkhar the Skulltaker was suddenly speechless. His glaring eyes were twitching back and forth between his killers and the being, who stood, statuesque, looking no longer sanguine.

‘Fine, you were right, Ikharios,’ he growled through gritted teeth. He sounded nervous. Afraid, maybe. ‘But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got my guns on you and this place belongs to my lord. Face it, you’re dead.’

I smiled and prepared to play my last card, one I didn’t even know if I had to play. ‘I don’t think your new boss is going to be very glad you led him into a trap.’ The Immortal-thing took a dangerous step forwards, drawing an enormous spiked mace from his back.

For the hundredth time since the battle of the basin, I whispered, ‘You still alive, Shi?’ over the vox-net. After a tense moment I finally, for the first time in days, heard a single, solitary click in reply.

I threw myself flat on the ground and covered my ears.

Shikhar Deadeye, and the whole of the Kraton Reapers’ sharpshooters, who’d silently tailed us since Kholkhar had ambushed me, opened fire from the outcroppings at the entrance to the laboratory. Around me I saw las-bolts and bullets and energy beams scythe down like rain, cutting down Scourge in the crossfire. The tattooed being was engulfed in gunfire, but rather than fall like a mortal he… it… rose, bellowing, its spiked mace suddenly burning with azure flame. I snatched up my fallen volkite charger and trained the barrel on Kholkhar.

The Skulltaker screamed.

I saw him stagger towards me, shrieking, clawing at his face. The grotesque brand on his throat glowed with weird light. He fell on the stumps of his legs, screaming, ‘No, please no, no, you promised!’ before his words were choked with blood, and his body began to contort. His backplate bulged as jagged horns ripped from his spine. His burly arms shrivelled and scabbed away as mucous tentacles burst forth. His face, which had remained sickeningly human, suddenly warped mid-plea, stretching with the gristly crack of snapping bone into a distended lamprey maw.

Looking around, I realised that the same hideous transformation was befalling the rest of the Abrax Scourge.

‘Kill them all, my children!’ the demigod bellowed.

I pulled the trigger, blasting a smoking crater through the thing that had been Kholkhar the Skulltaker. It didn’t even slow it as it charged, shrieking in an otherworldly howl. Before I could fire another shot, a precise bolt from Shikhar’s long-las punched through the monster’s ghoulish maw. The Kholkhar-monster stumbled as it tried to wrap its gruesome tentacles around my throat, which gave me just enough time to prime and fire, blowing its torso to gory mist.

I wiped stinging viscera from my eyes and beheld a massacre.

With our entrance blocked by the Immortal-thing, we had nowhere to flee but further into the Vault, hounded by the inhuman monstrosities that had consumed my Cthonian rivals. Half the Scourge seemed to have killed themselves before the transformation could take hold of them, but those that hadn’t had been possessed by hulking beasts that were armies unto themselves.

But foremost of threats was the crimson demigod.

I’d seen Immortals before, but rarely in combat, and never up close. The red giant charged into the thickest knot of Cthonians with speed that should have been impossible for something so large and heavy. It didn’t even bother to draw its firearm, choosing to lay into the screaming tunnel-gangers with its spiked mace, screaming in two voices, neither of which were human.

I’ve seen humans killed in any number of ways, and killed a great many of them myself, but the sheer bodily destruction it wreaked was enough to make my gorge rise, even as I exhausted my volkite charger. Men, even armoured men, were crushed to spurting lumps of viscera almost faster than I could see.

‘Forwards, blessed ones!’ the demigod roared, sounding jubilant and triumphant even as Shikhar’s sharpshooters pelted it with gunfire. ‘Claim this place for Lorgar Aurelian! Claim these treasures for the Pantheon! Baptise them in the blood of the unworthy!’

Again I heard that hideous, chittering, mewling, roaring cacophony rise, like it had in the basin. At the entrance to the Vault I saw a wave of slavering, shrieking, weeping freaks charging towards us, bursting through the narrow ingress like pus from a boil. Above, Shikhar was firing into their backs, but it was like attempting to douse a chem-fire by spitting on it.

The remaining few dozen Reapers, those that hadn’t been ripped apart by the flesh-monsters or pulverised by the Immortal-thing, reacted on desperate instinct, forming as good a firing line as could be expected of half-feral murderers. In the stark light of the laboratory I could see our hideous foes all the better, but it also helped my aim. I unleashed blast after blast of searing energy into the horde, but for every fiend turned to embers, two more gleefully trampled the corpse and took its place. The possessed flesh-monsters towered over the mass of mutants, trampling freaks in lunatic hunger to tear us apart.

I gritted my teeth and prepared to die very, very horribly.

But the Immortal-thing suddenly held up its blood-drenched fist. The wretched horde grudgingly heeled, like curs obeying their master, not out of loyalty, but by a strange chain around their throats. Gone was the psychopathic, murderous fury from its… his… face, replaced with a sort of placid demeanour that was if anything more terrifying.

‘Your name is Ikharios,’ the being intoned, staring into my soul with glowing eyes. ‘Although you’ve never understood what it means. I doubt whoever named you understood the significance either.’

I kept my volkite charger aimed at the demigod’s face, fighting to keep the tremor from my hands. I wasn’t certain I could kill him even if I tried.

‘It comes from an ancient Terran legend, from the Grecia tribes, of a boy who flew too close to Sol on waxen wings because he desired true freedom. I understand who you are, and why you came to this place, because our desires are shared.’ The Immortal-thing made a strange symbol over his chest. ‘I am Malga Drak of Colchis, former Chaplain of the Seventeenth Legion. The Pantheon I serve rewards those of vision, but demands competence. When I learned of this place, I whispered what I desired, and what I promised, into the dreams of tribes across this world, and I’d believed these savages to be the ones to deliver it to me…’ He paused, motioning to the monsters that’d possessed Kholkhar and his gang. ‘But as you stand triumphant, it is clear they were unworthy of my patronage.’

I suddenly found myself at a rare and utter loss for words.

The barrel of my volkite charger lowered slightly. ‘What are you proposing?’ I finally stammered, never letting my finger off the trigger.

The Colchisian giant took a step closer to me. The ground shook beneath his boot. Or recoiled. ‘The winds of Chaos blow across the galaxy, Ikharios, powers far older than you or I, or the Imperium, or even this world, and I’m giving you the chance to share in their holy bounty. With the treasures in this sanctum I will deliver Cthonia into the hands of the Pantheon, and once I am remade in accordance with the will of the Four, I will be capable of bestowing blessings beyond fathoming to those who bear my mark,’ he boomed, raising his hands like one of the Imperial preachers I’d seen as a boy. ‘I understand Cthonia is bound to the Law of the Blade – in this it is more naturally aligned with Chaos than you could imagine. I offer you the power to build a throne from the bones of your enemies, and the promise that when you sit upon it you will finally touch the sun which your namesake could never grasp.’

I glanced back at the strange golden artefact, at the laboratory full of wonders far beyond my comprehension, at the blood of my slain Reapers congealing among the brackish ichor of the otherworldly monsters that had devoured the Scourge, at the mutilated Cthonians that stood at Malga Drak’s back, desperate to rip me apart.

‘Or you and your tribe can die in ways that utterly defy your human imagination, your souls used to fuel my ascension,’ the Colchisian added, smiling without smiling, that awful something shifting beneath his tattooed skin. ‘The choice is yours – kneel or die – but the window to make said choice is narrowing.’

I paused as I felt the eyes of the surviving Reapers turn to me. In a moment I saw myself kneeling before Malga Drak of Colchis and accepting his dark offer.

I saw the Kraton Reapers marching from the Zone Mortalis with the blessings of an ascended Immortal, wielding weaponry and terrible power beyond my imagining, and bolstered by a horde of bloodthirsty abominations ready to tear my foes asunder.

I saw the Goredrinkers, the Iron Hunt, the Black Grin, and all the other tunnel-gangs that’d sneered at me as I’d fought for the scraps they left behind pleading for my mercy as I ground their mewling faces into the blood-soaked rock.

I saw all of Cthonia’s tunnel-hives bowing to me as their king, with everything I could ever want within my grasp.

And all I had to do was kneel.

In the end the choice was a simple one.

‘Shikhar,’ I voxed quietly. ‘Remember the last part of the plan? What to do if the plan goes to shit?’

I could see the corners around Malga Drak’s mouth twist in a scowl that only emphasised the dark monstrosity lurking beneath his… no, its… sanguine exterior. Its fingers tightened around the haft of its mace.

Click.

Even though I’d never been more terrified in my life, I grinned. ‘Do it, Shi, and when you get out of this damned place, make sure every Cthonian knows it was Ikharios Brehker and the Kraton Reapers that buried this monster and his pets.’

The brief thump-whoosh of the Kraton Reapers’ precious missile arsenal could be heard from outside the Vault, followed by deafening explosions that smashed the breath from my lungs. The Vault shook violently as thousands of tonnes of rubble dislodged, sealing the entrance once more.

The creature that called itself Malga Drak roared inhumanly and charged towards me, swinging its dripping mace, as its army of freaks and monsters rushed us. I raised my volkite charger, for all the good it would do me, and spent my last moments of life fighting beside my fellow Cthonians.

As long as I could remember I’d been fighting off anyone who wanted to throw shackles around my neck, whether that be rival gang-bosses, the Immortals, or even the Emperor, and I wasn’t about to let this off-world scum make me its slave, threats be damned.

I was a Cthonian, after all, and real Cthonians kneel to no one.

TRAITOR’S FAITH

NOAH VAN NGUYEN

Cthonia. Kovarny’s tongue grapples the dirty syllables, as well fitting as a knife between the ribs, a bullet in the head, a hammer to the heart. His world’s wasted, punchboard surface is as warm and familiar as a tar-fire. A pleasure to be back, even for war. A pleasure to savour the greasy flames in the broken spires, and to smell again the foundry smoke in the heartless, ashen sky.

His spear tip, the Heathens, are here for one reason. They must decapitate the force of loyalists holding the hive in their rigor mortis grip. No quarter will be asked for. None given.

Those were their orders.

Kovarny checks the ticking chrono in his wrist display, then shoves his combat blade into his chain belt. He rips a farewell lungful of smog into his lungs, locks his helmet in.

The display flickers. The squad-link clicks. ‘Harken,’ he says.

The others gather, his sergeants: Ugly Telojur, Rutimant, Wereddon Long-Neck, Lubastus. They are the Heathens, Sons of Horus, and Kovarny’s last lodge-brothers. Officially the Warmaster disbanded the lodges, yet the Quiet Order has existed in secrecy before. Doing it again is nothing. How many brothers remain, Kovarny can’t say.

‘Chieftain,’ Lubastus growls. ‘Waiting.’

Kovarny grunts, his maimed lips aching. The grimace in his jaws never goes away, the price of playing with warp fire. ‘Captain Ashurhaddon’s orders are in,’ he says. ‘Imperial forces are holed up in the mid-levels, harrying us with needle points, bogging down our axis of advance. Surface forces can’t consolidate until they’re removed.’

‘Astartes?’ Telojur asks.

Kovarny nods. ‘Imperial Fists. Veterans from the 212th. Newborns from the 465th and 532nd. Mortals in support. Auxilia, militia. Nothing special. They’re all led by Captain Garrius, Imperial Fists, 465th. Garrius commands resistance across Lupercal’s Gate.’

‘Traitor’s Gate,’ Wereddon corrects him.

Rutimant chuckles. ‘Has a ring to it, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Kovarny says. ‘A very blunt ring.’ He has never liked the loyalists’ spin on this war. It seems to him the only traitors are those Astartes who put the Emperor’s worthless vision of the Imperium before their brotherhood with the other Legions.

‘Mission parameters?’ Rutimant asks.

‘We’re Sons of Horus,’ Kovarny says. ‘We rip their throats out.’

Lubastus snarls. ‘No quarter.’

The others grunt. Violence blazes in their bellies like oil-fire. They’re made for this.

Now comes the hard part. ‘Garrius,’ Kovarny says. ‘Ashurhaddon wants him alive.’

The others glower.

‘Alive?’ Wereddon says.

‘Alive,’ Kovarny says. ‘Hearts pumping, lungs breathing. Alive means alive.’

No one likes it. But no one says a thing. They’d follow Kovarny into the hells and back. Truthfully, they already have.

Kovarny is pleased to hear no objections. ‘Two minutes. Once–‘

‘Why?’ Ul-Buus asks.

The Word Bearer’s voice is mellifluous, a death rattle, like silk rustling corpse-flesh. He is a Dark Apostle of the Secret Boon, attached to the Heathens as a missionary. His face is sallow, mottled with the warp’s blessed touch. His features sag, as if he’s animated by no more than the belly-deep bravura of his faith. Every time Kovarny sees Ul-Buus, the pagan litanies scratched into his traitor’s red ceramite, he’s reminded of souring wine. The taste, the look. The acrid burn in his hearts.

But they get along. The Word Bearer likes Kovarny’s sanguine faith in the Four; Kovarny enjoys Ul-Buus’ bloody theatrics.

‘Why what?’ Kovarny asks.

‘Why alive?’ Ul-Buus says. ‘Garrius won’t be amenable to capture.’

Kovarny’s glare is vicious. ‘Then we’ll be sure to ask nicely.’

The others chuckle. It’s a light distraction, because Kovarny knows they agree with Ul-Buus. Nobody wants to hold back against loyalist Astartes. To capture Garrius they’ll certainly have to.

Ul-Buus cocks his head. ‘Garrius. You knew him?’

Kovarny’s second heart fires. He did. He knew him well.

‘Not at all,’ Kovarny says.

Ul-Buus’ fingers flex over the gristle-bound haft of his accursed crozius. ‘I did. And I know Ashurhaddon, chieftain. He told me this was a decapitation. Something’s not adding up. Nobody wants captives more than I – the gods require tribute – but capturing Garrius is a dangerous risk. Excise the Fists. Show no quarter.’

‘Remarks noted, Word Bearer,’ Kovarny says. Then to the others: ‘Queries?’

None. Satisfied, Kovarny issues movement orders and the sergeants task their squads.

Before they leave, Kovarny claps the muzzle of his bolter against Ul-Buus’ rancid-red armour. ‘No more questioning orders, Word Bearer. Makes you look very shootable.’

Ul-Buus eases the muzzle down. ‘I serve at your leisure, chieftain. Consider my objection no more than counsel.’

Kovarny nods. Ul-Buus falls in with the others. Soon they’re moving out. The vox-channel bursts into activity as the Heathens bark terse status reports in Cthonic, their gravel voices grinding over the living squad-link.

The Word Bearer could be trouble. Better if he cooperates, Kovarny thinks. Better yet if he keeps his mouth shut.

Because Ashurhaddon didn’t order Kovarny to spare Garrius. That was Kovarny’s call. No matter what this war’s become, Garrius is his brother. He always will be, and Kovarny doesn’t leave brothers to die.

Brother. Kovarny’s ruinous smile stings with nostalgia.

It was Garrius who taught him the meaning of the word.

‘Legionary!’

A fortress of noon-yellow armour charged forwards. An Imperial Fist – a lieutenant judging by his heraldry. Legionaries covered their rear. Corpses and xenos surrounded them.

‘Sire.’ Kovarny ripped another abhuman’s head free, belting it with practised ease.

The Fist planted his storm shield, bolter barking. ‘Terra, are you mad?’

‘Yes, sire,’ Kovarny said. He wasn’t a liar back then. Not yet.

With his shield, Garrius battered an enemy drone away. ‘Savage.’

Kovarny laughed. His Legion stole him from a gang of Cthonian child-gangers who prowled their world’s sucked-dry tunnels taking skulls. Of course he was a savage.

He lurched forwards, to Garrius’ rear, smashing down a Lactrical-abhuman slave poised to strike the lieutenant with a saw-toothed energy weapon.

Kovarny ripped its head from its corpse, scratching another tally into his vambrace. ‘You owe this savage your life. Sire.’

Garrius chuckled, shaking with mirth. ‘I could get used to you, brother.’

Together they battled, under the milky glow of Lactrical’s moons.

The next evening they did it again.

Traitor’s Gate is a crater-gouged, bolt-pocked hunting ground. Unceasing barrages pound the surface levels. Flak peppers the burning sky. Battle rages in the atmosphere, in manufacturing sectors, in ruined habclaves once maggoty with human life.

Kovarny likes this war. It is a testament, like the slaughter-fields of Isstvan III, where he learned in cathartic simplicity just who was brother, and who was not. Cthonia is the test of him, showing him who he is, who he’s meant to be. Cthonia is a death knell, one of many, tolling endlessly across the void.

The loyalists trying to hold Traitor’s Gate, maybe they get it. The Sons of Horus prowling down the spires – they certainly do. Captain Ashurhaddon could have joined the Warmaster at Terra. Instead he brought his forces here, to make a point. The same point, Kovarny thinks, the loyalists want to make by resisting.

Garrius picked his side, same as every legionary. Kovarny knows that. He owes him nothing.

But brothers don’t abandon each other. They don’t give up on each other. Was that not the very reason Kovarny followed his Legion into heresy? Was that not how this all started?

And despite his war-thirst, uncertainty haunts Kovarny. In all the long years of glory and slaughter since Isstvan, he has killed more Astartes than he cares to remember. Brothers were never meant to kill brothers.

If Kovarny can turn Garrius, his doubt will smooth away like imperfections filed from metal. His hard decisions all these years will finally be validated. He knows he made the right choice. This will prove it.

Garrius will see the truth. He’s always been reasonable, and it won’t hurt that he owes Kovarny his life. He will make the choice Kovarny made – he just needs the chance.

Bralkar is a many-spoked junction in the hive’s haemorrhaging heart. The junction yokes the perished transit networks of Traitor’s Gate together. From here, for months, Garrius has coordinated his vain war. From here, loyalist sorties have divided the sledgehammer of Ashurhaddon’s forces, preventing consolidations and delaying what should have been a quick, soundless triumph.

Bralkar is perfect for this. Accessible, discreet, defensible. The site is so ideal as a base of operations, the Heathens knew exactly where to find it.

Passing into visual range, Kovarny gives a long, low whistle. The junction’s fortifications are impressive. The tunnels and tracks leading into the multi-level station are covered from every angle, by all manner of weapons. Tactical and supplemental flaywire embroiders the approaches, channelling them into killing zones. Like the spines of a cactus, the Solar Auxilia’s Kalibrax lasrifles bristle from behind poured rockcrete barriers and stiffened sandbag emplacements. The glaring muzzles of heavier ordnance leer out from pillboxes like black, begrudging eyes.

A castle, within a fortress, within a citadel. That’s what Garrius has built. Were he here to defend it, the loyalists might hold this junction for days, until sustained pressure finally broke it.

So where is he?

The Sons of Horus attack. They’re a buzzing storm of bolter fire and chain weapons, fighting like wolves. They crush the outer defences, but not a single Fist emerges. They stamp the mortal defenders into the stonework, but not a single bolter fires back. Ul-Buus tears Solar Auxilia apart, cracking their Solar-pattern void armour open, dangling their innards over his black teeth.

Still no Fists.

The Heathens repopulate Bralkar’s broken defences, thumbing bolts into box magazines and winding fresh teeth tracks around gore-logged chainblades. Kovarny slides his helmet free, inhaling the junction’s vapours. ‘Where are they?’

‘Here, according to augurs.’ Rutimant shows Kovarny the blinking screen of his auspex.

Kovarny glances around. ‘But clearly not.’

‘Kove.’ Telojur lugs a device forwards, a vox-caster ripped from its mount. ‘Found the tercio commander slagging her comms.’

Kovarny winces. That is not something which someone who wanted to defend this place would do. Not if they needed reinforcements to do it.

His forever-smile throbs. ‘Bring her here.’

Telojur flinches. Then Kovarny notices the still-dripping skull hanging from the sergeant’s belt.

‘No quarter, you said.’ Telojur glances down. ‘You Captain Garrius, ma’am?’

The Heathens chuckle.

Kovarny indicates the next level of the junction. ‘There’s a fuel bunker staged up there. Clear it. If there’s anything more than fumes left, we’ll mark it for the slaves to salvage. The rest of you, monitor the adjacent tunnels. Garrius could be back at any time. Go.’

They leave.

Ul-Buus, alone with Kovarny, speaks. ‘Something troubles you, chieftain.’

Kovarny gestures vaguely. ‘This.’ The junction’s shattered defences, the wet carpet of Solar Auxilia, the blasted shipping equipment made into hasty obstacles. Tracks run into the transit nexus across three levels. Tunnel mouths gape open at them from every direction.

‘Look at it all,’ Kovarny says. ‘A fortress. But Garrius didn’t bother defending it. Instead he blurs our augurs with false read-outs of power armour. Why?’

‘You believe it’s a decoy?’

‘I believe it’s a lure. I just don’t see what for. If he wanted to ambush us, he had his chance during our assault. Now we hold the junction, and we butchered his dogs. And that’s another thing. Garrius doesn’t leave allies to die. It’s shameful.’

‘How would you know?’

Kovarny bites down. ‘He’s a Fist. All Fists are like that.’

‘This war’s changed all of us,’ Ul-Buus says. ‘Maybe Garrius no longer fights as Dorn ordains.’

‘Maybe. But losing strongpoints like this won’t win him any garlands. Telojur, anything?’

The squad-link clicks. ‘Bunker fuel, dirty promethium. Nothing worth salvaging. Clearing the loading cell. Stand by.’

Kovarny turns to Ul-Buus. ‘I don’t think Garrius wanted to hold Bralkar. I think he wanted us to take it.’

‘Kove,’ Rutimant interrupts over vox.

‘Hail.’

‘Augur-senses show another sensor blur. Main tunnel, second level, approaching fast. Something big.’

‘Astartes?’ Kovarny asks.

‘Possibly. If so, they’re massed and closing. Give us your blessing and we’ll engage.’

‘Granted.’

As Sons of Horus orient around the tunnel, weapons fixed on the darkness, Kovarny remains silent. Everything about this nags at him. It’s all too easy.

Then bolter fire chants from above, near the fuel bunker, followed by the muted crump of a detonated grenade.

‘Telojur,’ Kovarny says. ‘Talk to me.’

Static screeches. ‘Fists in the loading cell. No – Warmaster’s teeth, it’s only one of them, here to die!’

Lubastus and Urnfiller squads are already moving up to assist.

‘I’ll go too,’ Ul-Buus says.

Kovarny stops him. ‘A lone legionary, holed up in a fuel bunker – that’s no defence. It’s a sacrifice. They’re drawing us in to–’

Then he understands.

‘Heathens,’ Kovarny barks in Cthonic. ‘Egress, brothers. Subsidiary shaft, first level, north-north-west. Move.’

‘Kove, the tunnel–’ Rutimant starts.

Kovarny overrides him. ‘Take no heed of it. This is a trap. Garrius is herding us.’

Without further question the Heathens comply. The whole junction quakes with the stampede-pounding of legionaries in motion. Joined by Telojur’s withdrawing Sons of Horus, Lubastus and the Urnfillers divert to the subsidiary shaft.

Bolter fire still rattles off near the fuel bunker when trundling metal echoes from the main transitway. Wheels cackle on rails in the dark.

A flatbed freight tram, as wide and long as a Stormbird, rips into Bralkar from the tunnel. The heavy-duty carriage sags from the weight of the munitions. It flicks a crane arm aside, careering on to the junction’s centre, towards the dome-like fuel bunker.

The Heathens are almost out. Rutimant, Wereddon, Lubastus–

‘Telojur,’ Kovarny says. He starts for the fuel bunker.

Ul-Buus seizes him by his power pack, tossing him behind a ferrocrete lip in the auxiliary shaft. ‘You’ll get yourself killed, chieftain.’

He’s right. Growling, Kovarny spares a final glance. Telojur, wounded, drags himself from the loading cell along a cloistered walkway. A battered legionary in bright, eye-puckering yellow limps behind him, weapon raised, aiming at the back of Telojur’s head. ‘For Terra!’ he howls.

Kovarny sights in.

‘For the Emp–’

The freight tram slams into the bunker, exploding. The empty bunker’s promethium fumes ignite, shredding the reinforced plasteel shielding into titanic shrapnel.

The blast is a hurricane. The junction comes apart, bottom up, just as Kovarny hammers back behind cover. Mulched brick and metal shards gust into the tunnel, chinking against his armour.

And just like that, Telojur is gone.

The Heathens rearm in the cramped brickwork tunnel. Ul-Buus’ harsh ministrations carry through the baking darkness.

Kovarny is sour-eyed and silent. The absence of Telojur is heavy upon him, like an anchor on his soul. The sergeant is dead. Nothing can change that, nor the fact that Kovarny is responsible.

This is war. Fine. Kovarny’s under no illusions about what that means. Still, he can’t help but wonder what might have been different if he hadn’t embarked upon this mission to turn Garrius. He would have been more patient, more cautious. He wouldn’t have had the Heathens wait around for Garrius to launch his trap.

Kovarny dismisses these thoughts, dragging another lungful of dirty air behind his sick smile. ‘Rutimant. Ready?’

‘Almost,’ Rutimant says, reconfiguring his auspex scanner. The Solar Auxilia’s salvaged command vox lies between them, boxy and ugly, cords and power components trailing it like fallen pennants.

Then the auspex beeps. ‘Ready,’ Rutimant says.

Kovarny raises the receiver to his wrecked grimace. ‘Garrius. Impressive, what you did back there. The legionary you sacrificed, what was his name?’

The receiver clicks. Silence follows. Hope, liquid and warm, slow-cooks in Kovarny’s hollow gut. It simmers, boiling off like steam, until the empty vessel of him is searing and dry.

Still nothing but silence. Kovarny lowers the receiver, his smile aching.

Then the channel crackles. ‘Solon. His name was Solon. How do you know mine?’

Kovarny’s eyes wander to Ul-Buus, who still makes his rounds among the Heathens, out of earshot.

‘In the gheist-forests of Lactrical,’ Kovarny says. ‘Butchering the xenos and their slaves, I plucked heads from the abhumans’ corpses. I’m the savage who saved your life.’

Rutimant flinches, narrowing his eyes.

‘Kovarny,’ Garrius snarls, his voice like a mechanical gust.

Kovarny licks his scarred lips. Garrius remembers him, then. ‘You told me something,’ Kovarny says. ‘Before we parted. Remember?’

‘I remember everything about you, traitor.’

Kovarny chuckles. ‘Here we are, brother. Fighting together again, just as you predicted.’

‘Kovarny,’ Garrius says. ‘Before this battle ends, I shall be picking the pieces of you from my weapons. Killing you – I won’t enjoy it. It will be an errand. Consider this line dead, traitor.’

The channel clicks, and static rules the dead wavelength.

Kovarny’s smile aches. Garrius knows he’s coming now.

Good. This is personal. It always was.

‘I’ve tracked their location,’ Rutimant says. ‘They’re on the move.’

A brawl was breaking out. For all their transhuman virtues, the assembled legionaries were behaving no better than children.

They were bickering about whose primarch was better.

‘Kovarny,’ Garrius said. ‘You’re part of this?’

Kovarny clenched his jaw. ‘An insult to the Lupercal is an insult to all of us!’

The ground shook; the Luna Wolves roared. The Imperial Fists frowned, not impressed, not affronted, not annoyed.

‘Keep your blood down,’ Garrius said. ‘We’ve slaughtered the same enemies on the same fields. We’re brothers, like our gene-fathers. So we settle this like brothers.’

Kovarny balled his fists. ‘I like the sound of that.’

Garrius swelled up and raised his mug. ‘The Emperor, beloved by all, has a favoured son! To the Lupercal, lord of the Sixteenth!’

The gathered Fists raised their cups, howling at Lactrical’s moons.

It was… a toast. A toast and a playful jeer.

Kovarny deflated. ‘You honour the Lupercal?’

Garrius’ laughter was like an earthquake. ‘The primarchs are brothers, as are we! To honour us one is to honour us all!’

The medial axis of Traitor’s Gate is a mess of snaking shipping lanes. Transitways soar over each other, criss-crossing and darting along the hive’s mountainous buttresses. Their arches fly out miraculously to the lower hive superstructure, testaments to human audacity.

Major transit spines bridge the buttresses. The macro-routes are stuffed with smaller transport ducts. They’re deserted, exposed to the burning sky. Empty vehicles and overturned freight containers fill the roads, the civilian detritus of war.

Kovarny peers into the distance, scrying the bridge for the loyalists. The smog-blurred vista reminds him of a nest of mountain vines connecting two cliffs.

Wereddon raises his plate-encumbered arm, pointing. ‘There. East-north-east. Legionaries, marching to the next buttress. A squad at least.’

‘Sighted,’ Kovarny says. ‘That’s a fraction of them.’

‘The fraction we came for,’ Lubastus says, a throat-cutting edge in his tone. ‘Ruti’s augur-trace leads here.’

‘Then Garrius will be with them.’ Kovarny checks his ammo load. ‘Prepare to close.’

The others share a hesitant look, demurring.

‘Your brothers fear speaking the truth, chieftain,’ Ul-Buus says. ‘That bridge is a bottleneck. More loyalists will be sentinelling the pass from a distance. If we cross in pursuit, they’ll slaughter us like lambs.’

Kovarny cocks his head. ‘Get to your point.’

Ul-Buus’ expression softens. ‘Request atmospheric support. Drop everything we have on them, and then some more. If the spine still stands, we’ll confirm their deaths and take your trophies.’

‘If not?’

Ul-Buus shrugs. ‘Good riddance.’

‘Garrius–’

‘Will be dead. And the decapitation mission will be successful, at the expense of failing Ashurhaddon’s vainglorious request.’ Ul-Buus’ jaw hardens. ‘Garrius is worthless alive. You know this.’

Kovarny looks at the others. Ashurhaddon wanted him to eliminate resistance in the mid-levels, but this was never about the mission. It’s about brotherhood. It’s about proving something, to himself if no one else.

And Garrius, despite everything, is still Kovarny’s brother.

‘Alive,’ Kovarny says. ‘This isn’t up for discussion.’

Kovarny issues his movement orders. Ul-Buus falls back into formation, taciturn and melancholic.

The Imperial Fists have already crossed the yawning gulf between the hive buttresses. Now they attend to something on the far side.

The Heathens move. Their advance will be simple. Lubastus will take Urnfiller squad along the transit spine’s lower level. Then, Kovarny’s Heathens will advance with Ul-Buus along the surface. They’ll converge on the far side, keeping the remaining Heathens as reserves and fire support until they are needed.

Then they will capture Garrius and kill the rest. The Fist will see reason. He won’t get a choice.

As expected, the guns of loyalist sentinel positions roar to life on the far side. Neither Lubastus nor Kovarny slow their advance. Their power armour weathers the worst of the chuntering small-arms fire and strobing las-beams. Soon the Heathens’ fire support barks back, distracting the loyalists.

On the far side, Garrius’ loyalists hold. It’s enough to concern Kovarny, who senses another trap. The Imperial Fists could flee – that was always a possibility. But after their exchange over the command vox, Kovarny somehow doubts it. Things are personal.

So what is Garrius waiting for? And why is the hive shaking?

‘What is that?’ Kovarny shouts.

‘Detonations,’ Wereddon returns. ‘Demo-packs, on the bridge’s near-side anchorage. They sheared a support strut right off.’

‘Harken,’ Lubastus interrupts. ‘I see them on the far-side anchorage. Garrius’ element – I can tell by the captain’s heraldry. They’re planting more det-packs.’

Garrius. Kovarny’s smile drums with pain. He means to bring down the spine. It doesn’t matter if this is another trap, or if Garrius only means to cut off Kovarny’s pursuit. If this bridge collapses, the Heathens are dead.

Another blast drowns out the background rat-a-tat of incoming fire. The change in gradient is slight, sudden and grim. The spine’s soaring superstructure groans beneath Kovarny’s boots.

‘Lubastus,’ Kovarny barks. ‘Engage. Delay them.’

‘Acknowledged, chieftain.’

‘Wereddon, Rutimant, ignore their sentinels. Focus fire on the Fists. Keep Lubastus covered.’

‘Acknowledged, Kove.’

Kovarny transmits a terse request for atmospheric support. Before he can issue orders to his own squad, circumstances dictate them to him. Imperial Fists approach. Not Garrius’ element but a second force, a wall of them, citrus-bright and trimmed with dirty iron. Their sturdy bolters peek out hatefully from behind their storm shields.

Ul-Buus, his crozius humming, advances. He bellows a dark prayer, cackling each syllable, drawing malign shapes in the air. Theatrics, Kovarny thinks.

His squad charges, a pack of wolves mauling into the shield wall. Hornets of incoming bolter fire buzz overhead, clapping into ceramite, clanging against plasteel. Frantic chatter possesses the squad-link. The combat is a blur. Everything seems to happen all at once. Kovarny’s stuck in; Lubastus requests support; the reserve Heathens manoeuvre onto the spine. If Lubastus dies before stopping Garrius from detonating the far-side anchorage, they’re done for.

Ul-Buus crows an evil prayer, slipping between ear-aching warp-tongues and his sickly honeyed Colchisian dialect. His accursed crozius flashes with baleful light, crackling and spitting with the blood of Dorn.

Kovarny’s bolter bucks with fire. He jerks the fang of his blade into a joint in yellow warplate. Armour-senses assist his transhuman awareness. He compartmentalises the sea of overwhelming stimuli, scheduling necessary reactions in flickering moments. Stimulus, reaction. Stimulus, reaction.

The transit spine’s superstructure groans again, juddering another degree down. For a dazzling moment of weightless clarity, Kovarny thinks not of battle, but of falling. Tumbling, over and over, to Cthonia’s surface, to the tunnel-riddled crust he once prowled for skulls.

Then the sky catches fire.

A flight of Fire Raptors painted in XVI Legion colours have been diverted from their atmospheric orbit. They make their first pass over the far-side loading hub, pummelling the place where Lubastus has fallen silent. Nose-mounted assault cannons rip to life in angry unison. Quad-linked heavy bolters follow, their impacts like the trampling of dragons.

After the second pass, the loyalists’ sentinel positions break. By the third, Rutimant and Wereddon establish fire superiority. The Heathens in reserve join Kovarny’s squad. The Imperial Fists standing against them are soon, suddenly, not.

By the fourth ground-rippling gun pass, enemy resistance is shattered.

‘Chieftain,’ Ul-Buus wheezes. He is exhausted. Combat with the Legiones Astartes is no minor errand. ‘Lubastus.’

Lubastus. He requested support.

Kovarny spins away, leading the remains of his squad across the rest of the spine.

The far-side loading hub is a wasteland of ruined industrial storage. During the gun runs, Garrius’ det-pack stores were detonated in sympathetic blasts before they could be emplaced. Bodies crowd the hub. Heaps of ravaged legionaries in yellow and sea-green warplate feed expanding pools of oxygen-rich blood on the ground.

‘Find Garrius,’ Kovarny orders. Anticipation gnaws at his calm. He has come too far and sacrificed too much to let Garrius get away. It cannot end like this.

As his forces fan out, Ul-Buus tramps closer. ‘Kovarny. Look.’

Kovarny’s eyes snap over. Lubastus is strewn out across the killing grounds, recognisable, even in pieces.

Kovarny doffs his helm and exhales, expelling his power armour’s canned air, gulping down his dead world’s sooty atmosphere. Seeing Lubastus like this, he feels the years on him. They were once Legion novitiates together.

Ul-Buus surveys the dead, a dour fog in his gaze. ‘Garrius did this, Kovarny. To your brothers. To our brothers.’

Kovarny rams a fresh magazine home, unspeaking. His legionaries soon report. Garrius isn’t here. He got away.

Kovarny kneels beside his dead brother, running his fingers through his wet meat. He tastes the blood, wondering at the coppery tang. His omophagea processes Lubastus’ genetic material, transmuting it into strange visions of his brother’s final thoughts. Kovarny can’t make sense of what he sees, but the visions are still a comfort.

This quest for Garrius has gone too far. And it will only get worse.

In Traitor’s Gate, night is a meaningless distinction. Frail light smoulders from the other structures: wounds in the hive, flickering like trash fires. Ships scythe through the glowing sky. Support haulers with fresh ammo, fresh fuel and fresh slaves.

Kovarny knows, as Garrius must, that their dance is almost complete. Both forces hunker down, neither willing to move first, to silhouette themselves on the enemy’s augurs. It is a hunt like any other. Patience wins the meat.

‘Chieftain,’ Ul-Buus says. ‘We must speak.’

Kovarny’s smile tenses. The flames of war across the hive remind him of simpler days, dancing around a burn pit with his gang, swinging fresh heads through the air. ‘Speak,’ he says.

‘Garrius. He was your friend during the Great Crusade. No?’

Every fibre of Kovarny’s senses sharpens. He detects the toxic cut in the air, the hot gurgle of his overworked armour, the uneven pulse of war across the hive. ‘He was my brother. He still is.’

Ul-Buus is utterly gentle, a ghost of his battlefield self. All Kovarny can think is that his crozius is silent. ‘You seek a noble thing,’ Ul-Buus says. ‘To convert another legionary. To spread the Primordial Truth. That is righteous. That is mighty.’

‘Speak plainly. You condemn me.’

‘No, Kovarny. I know your story. I’ve stood in your place. For decades I dreamt of liberating the Legions from the Emperor’s lies. I laboured in secret to bring the truth to you. I did it for the same reason you seek to save Garrius. I love you. No matter what you believe, chieftain, we’re brothers too. You seek something precious, as I once did. But Garrius has made his choice clear. He’s our enemy, Kovarny. When will you see?’

The Dark Apostle is not wrong. Garrius is killing Kovarny’s legionaries. If the Heathens are Kovarny’s brothers, how can Garrius be?

Kovarny meant to prove something by turning him. To prove his own righteousness, and his loyalty to his brothers, if not the Emperor. Now his own hypocrisy is cast into his face.

‘You don’t know Garrius as I do,’ Kovarny says. ‘He will turn. He is one of us. A brother. He needs only to be shown the truth.’

Ul-Buus stares. ‘I knew Garrius better than you think. The Sons of Horus were not the only Legion to serve with the Fists. Garrius is stone, and he is fire. I think you know that. But I think you’ve blinded yourself and I can’t see why. I knew Garrius wouldn’t turn the moment you gave your brief. Even if he did – even if you were the one to do it – you have more brothers than that stiff-necked Fist. Think of the Heathens. Think of the lives this vanity has cost us and the lives which remain. That is the brotherhood you must fight for, chieftain. Not some vainglorious wish to return to your lost past.’

Kovarny, silent, feels the core of himself melting. Like quicksilver, seeping through the cracks of his armour, running down the slopes of Traitor’s Gate. He feels naked. He feels as if Ul-Buus stares through everything he is, to the ugly meat underneath. Kovarny has killed so many Astartes. He does not wish to kill Garrius, too.

The Word Bearer’s voice smooths. ‘Far more legionaries joined the Warmaster for the sake of brotherhood than the rewards of faith. No one is blind to that. You are not alone. Respect the bonds you have forged with us, for they shall shield you. Your quest for Garrius’ salvation will cost you everything. He has forgotten you. You must forget him, too.’

Kovarny, armour creaking under the punishment of its own weight, rises.

Ul-Buus clicks the activation rune on his crozius. It chugs to bitter life. ‘Careful, chieftain. I will not warn you twice.’

Kovarny mag-locks his bolter. ‘No. You’re right. Brother or not, Garrius is not the legionary I believed him to be. I would not have seen it without you, Ul-Buus. You have my gratitude. It is time to correct my error.’

Ul-Buus does not relax. He does not power down his crozius. ‘I serve at your leisure.’

Kovarny sighs, eyeing Ul-Buus’ raised crozius. The Word Bearer is no fool. A pity.

In a single pulse of motion, Kovarny draws his combat blade, slashing at Ul-Buus’ neck.

Ul-Buus is fast. He blocks the blow, rams his crozius into Kovarny’s chest as Kovarny’s fist sweeps down towards his face.

The strikes land simultaneously. Kovarny’s armour thrums like a struck bell. Ul-Buus recoils, disoriented.

‘I saved his life! He saved mine!’ Acid spittle flies from Kovarny’s clenched teeth. He follows with another strike, and another. ‘You do not understand. You could not! Word Bearers, serpents! You turned us against each other! You’re the rot within our brotherhood! You’re the canker within our souls!’

With a sledgehammer blow, Kovarny splinters Ul-Buus’ face. His vice-like grip clamps around the Word Bearer’s fleshy jaw, tearing it free from his skull.

In the open pocket of Ul-Buus’ upper jaw, torn tendons and exposed bone dribble saliva and blood. His humming maul clanks down to the deck. He croaks damply for words, reaching for his useless mouth, then his pistol.

Kovarny seizes him, driving him towards the precipice like a battering ram. Ul-Buus flies out into the canyon-emptiness of Traitor’s Gate, soundlessly disappearing over the edge.

Eight seconds later, the crunch of his impact echoes back.

Kovarny looks below, picking out the broken line of the Word Bearer’s corpse. Vertigo pushes up his throat, from his belly into his eyes, nothing to do with the heights he stares down.

‘You are not my brother,’ Kovarny mutters through closed teeth, leaving to find the captured loyalist vox-caster.

‘Lieutenant Garrius.’

‘Kovarny. A welcome surprise, brother. I didn’t expect to see you again.’

Kovarny offered the mirror coin he had brought: a traditional Cthonian gang-honour, punched from the thick carapace of a Lactrical urchin-drone, shined to perfection.

Garrius hesitated. ‘What is this?’

‘A death coin. My gift to you. A reminder of where you’d be without me.’

Garrius scowled, until Kovarny could no longer keep the grin from his face.

Then Garrius smiled. ‘You jest?’

‘You saved my skin too, lieutenant. Consider it a token of my esteem. A reminder. Without each other we’d both be dead.’

Garrius inspected the coin. He took Kovarny’s hand, clapping it back into his palm. ‘I cannot accept this. My superiors will think I’ve joined one of your lodges. Besides, I need no memento to remember you are my brother. Well done, Kovarny. I look forward to showing you savages up again.’

‘Careful,’ Kovarny said. ‘One of these days you might find this savage picking the pieces of you from his weapons.’

Garrius laughed, then grew serious. ‘We come from different places. But our Legion traditions are trappings, no more. Far more unites us’ – he tapped Kovarny’s armour – ‘than divides us. You’re with Captain Sejanus and Fourth Company?’

Kovarny nodded.

‘I’ll find you next time our Legions meet. I sense this is not our final battle together, brother.’

This is not our final battle together, brother.

Kovarny packs the old mirror coin back into his war-belt. The past is dead; only the future remains undetermined. Before him, the vox crackles with blank distortion. Garrius still hasn’t replied.

Ul-Buus is dead. Lubastus and Telojur, dead. Over fifteen battle-brothers, all from Kovarny’s nearly extinct lodge – dead. These facts weigh on Kovarny like chains. He cannot change them.

Mission priorities are clear. Tactical solutions, obvious. Kovarny must withdraw his Heathens. He must tap the Legion’s atmospheric superiority, pound the hive buttresses into oblivion. Let the loyalists be scoured from Traitor’s Gate at arm’s length. Let Garrius’ forces tumble off the burning mountain like worthless ants. Maybe Ul-Buus was right. Maybe there could be no brotherhood with loyalists. Maybe they were all like this: soulless drones devoted to the sterile idea of the Imperium more than the blazing brotherhood of their own gene-kin.

Maybe Kovarny and the Sons of Horus really were traitors, just as the loyalists constantly crowed.

Kovarny keys the vox. ‘After Lactrical,’ he says, ‘the Lupercal gathered the Legion veterans for review. The crusade had hit its stride, brother. The Lupercal wanted to know what lessons we had learned, exterminating the xenos alongside your praetorians.’

No answer.

‘Discussion came up about your breacher squads,’ Kovarny says. ‘The storm shields, Garrius. I thought such units ripe with tactical possibility. Others mocked the notion aloud. They joked that you sons of Dorn hide behind your shields because you can’t go to war without fortifying something.’

Kovarny chuckles at the recollection. Still, from the vox, smothering silence.

‘I spoke in your defence,’ Kovarny says. ‘You were my brothers. At first my comrades did not see, as I once didn’t. But your victories were our victories. I did not fear your strengths, for they were my strengths.’ For one dazzling instant, Kovarny’s smile is light. ‘I spoke against them, and eventually they agreed. When the Lupercal introduced breacher squads into the Legion, my brothers and I were the first to begin training with them.’

Still, no answer.

Kovarny’s dead rictus grows corpse-stiff. ‘You were my brother, too, Garrius. I wish you fortune in the slaughter ahead.’

‘Enough, Kovarny. What is this game?’

Kovarny’s second heart pounds to life. ‘This is the end, Garrius. You’re finished. You know as well as I do. Soon Ashurhaddon will come for you, and he will send more than a hasty spear tip of old despoilers like us. See reason. Surrender. Your mortals must be sacrificed – that is unavoidable. But Ashurhaddon can be magnanimous. I’ll vouch for your legionaries. All of them.’

‘No.’

Kovarny pounds the rockcrete. The ground buckles.

But Garrius is not finished. ‘You are the one who must see reason, Kovarny. If you hold to heart what I said all those years ago, there is hope for you yet. Abandon your Warmaster. Renounce your false gods and your Traitor Legion. Return to your true brothers. We await you.’

Kovarny blinks. ‘I’m listening.’

Garrius provides a time and a place familiar to him. ‘Meet us. Alone. Prove you are not beyond redemption, and that your faith is worth fighting for.’ He pauses. ‘I look forward to our meeting. Do not let me down.’

Higher in the hive structure, Rutimant peers doubtfully at his auspex, then into the silent loading deck.

‘They’re not here,’ he says. ‘Vox traffic is concentrated deeper in the substructure, under the hive buttresses.’

Kovarny trusts Garrius’ word far more than Rutimant’s augur-senses. Those signals are decoys, same as in Bralkar. He’s certain.

‘Hold the Heathens here,’ Kovarny orders. ‘When I emerge with the Fists, leave Garrius alive. Slaughter the rest.’

Rutimant holds Kovarny back. ‘Chieftain. Look at yourself. Your grimace bleeds shadows. Your eyes shine with warp light. Your judgement is unsound.’

Kovarny pushes free. ‘Be ready.’

‘Kovarny.’ Rutimant grits his teeth, eyes stabbing. ‘Where is Ul-Buus?’

Kovarny stops. He feels the acid burn of sour wine in his chest.

Then he enters the loading deck alone, leaving Rutimant’s question unanswered.

The loading deck is dark. Embarkation platforms and wide staging berths fill the chamber. Flatbed trams sit in neat ranks on the walls, like Stormbirds on launch racks. The motive force in this sector is dead. The smelter-hot glow from the planet’s surface gleams weakly inside, holding hands with the vague din of war.

‘Garrius?’ Kovarny scans the shadows, ready for anything. Finding Garrius is only the beginning. Then he’ll have to lure the Fists outside, help Rutimant restrain Garrius and kill the others. He’ll have to explain his decisions to Ashurhaddon. He’ll have to explain Ul-Buus’ death.

And even then, even if Ashurhaddon accepts what Kovarny’s done and why, turning Garrius won’t be easy. Imperial Fists are renowned for their fortitude of character, for the strength of their will. If Garrius decides to be stubborn, turning him will be like bending stone.

It will be painful to watch, even for one who has come to relish the agony of others. Garrius will suffer. He’ll resist the warp’s touch, as Kovarny once did, as Rutimant still does.

But think of the rewards! Kovarny imagines Garrius beside him, part of the Heathens. He sees them, smells the char of flesh and cordite in the air as they stand triumphant upon the rubble of broken worlds.

The blood shall spill endlessly. The renown shall be infinite. And when Garrius accepts the Primordial Truth, Kovarny can finally rest assured of the righteousness of the path which led him here.

A pity they’ll never have the chance to fight beside Lubastus, nor Telojur. Kovarny’s hearts sting at the thought of what this endeavour has cost him. He must remember to be gracious. To not resent his brother for what his defiance has cost them. Garrius did not know what he was doing.

‘Garrius,’ Kovarny says, bracing for a wall of bolter fire in reply.

Nothing answers. Only the echo of his voice, and the slow drip of engine lubricant from unused trams. The pulse of pagan war thuds like drums throughout the hive.

There. Yellow plate, barely visible in the ghost of the loading deck’s light.

But that’s no legionary. It’s a storm shield.

Kovarny halts, his armour servos whirring as he picks up the shield, each breath bitter and slow. The Imperial Fists are not here. Garrius never came.

Garrius lied, even when everything was in his favour. He could have tried to ambush the Heathens. He could have set a trap to capture Kovarny. Kovarny wouldn’t have resented that; he half-expected it. This was supposed to be personal. Now it really was.

Outside, the Heathens are gone.

Kovarny storms from the loading deck. His bolter quivers in hand, yearning with hatred and a red, rebel hunger.

‘Rutimant,’ Kovarny says. ‘Damn you, where are you?’

Gunfire chatters over the squad-link. ‘Contact, brother. Below, in segment Trudar-Silver, within the petal girders. We could use you back in the hunt, chieftain.’

Kovarny is already on his way.

A gene-forging facility in the hive structure’s axial girder sheaths, at the lowest level of the hive buttresses. This is what Garrius has battled to protect. This is why he has dragged out his vain resistance, to defend whatever precious gene-seed this place contained.

This cramped, baroque, worthless lab.

Kovarny focuses. The holding tanks are empty. Whatever was stored here is gone. A scalpel-precise blast has opened an incision in the reinforced plasteel floor. The fissure leads down to the lower hive blocks.

Heathens in war-scorched armour circle the fissure, weapons barking into the chasm, shoulders bucking as return fire skips off their pauldrons.

Kovarny finds Rutimant. ‘Where is he?’

Rutimant hardly glances up, emptying another magazine below. ‘Take a guess.’

Kovarny glares down. It’s dark. Sporadic muzzle flashes puncture the dismal corridors.

Rutimant reloads. ‘Wereddon’s searching for a route to cut them off. They’re preparing to blast the structure open and extract.’ He fires again. ‘This’ll be close, Kove.’

Kovarny dodges a stray round, gazing into the chasm. It’s not too far down. Thirty metres, give or take.

‘Kovarny,’ Rutimant says. ‘When this is over, we must speak. About Ul-Buus. About Garrius–’

Kovarny leaps into the twilight.

He craters the asphalt. Seams crack along the length of his leg plates. Rising, his armour groans. It wasn’t built for that kind of impact.

Above, Rutimant stares, stunned. The squad-link bursts to life as the Heathens confirm what just happened, then move to support Kovarny’s assault.

Kovarny ignores them, because this isn’t an assault – and there they are. The Imperial Fists blast away at the Heathens, ushering each other into a ribbed passage with billowing coal-black smoke.

At last, Kovarny sees the truth. Garrius doesn’t care about brotherhood. His deception was just a ruse to buy time for this extraction. For his mission.

Kovarny groans, breathing hard. He thinks of the Heathens who died for this. For nothing.

He’ll kill Garrius. Not for the living, not for the dead. Just for himself.

The Heathens are scattered between this level and the next. Kovarny doesn’t wait for them. He barrels forwards. The loyalists, caught off guard by the sheer insanity of his lone charge, raise their bolters and fire.

Kovarny connects first. He punches a barrel aside, tackling its owner, shouting the name of the one he seeks. ‘Garrius!’

The loyalists reply. With throat-grating battle cries, and weapons, and brutal, club-like fists. Kovarny casts aside his boltgun, its muzzle smoking and magazine empty. His combat knife slices through the air, chipping into unforgiving ceramite.

Smoke blinds his visual filters; he tears his helmet off. Better to feel the fire in his lungs. Better to feel anything at all, besides the knife Garrius has spiked into his back.

Kovarny fights, roaring, hopelessly beyond triumph.

‘Gar… ri… uss!’

Kovarny’s garbled syllables, the name they half-resemble, stop the Fists from killing him. Behind him, the Heathens suffer heavy losses, beleaguered by a hail of loyalist fire, headless without their chieftain.

Kovarny hammers his hands towards the nearest flash of eye-lenses. Something jerks him back, rams his face, denting his skull.

A Fist bearing captain’s heraldry moves before Kovarny and removes his helmet. ‘Kovarny. Sacred Terra, you sick animal.’

A word leaks out from Kovarny’s wrecked smile. ‘Brother.’

Garrius’ proud features are a blur, but the old him shines through. The brightness, the boldness. The utter solidity of stone.

Then Garrius shakes his head. ‘You are not my brother, Kovarny.’

‘No,’ Kovarny slavers. ‘But I was, once. I came for you, Garrius. You called me brother on Lactrical. You lied. Brothers do not turn their backs on each other. They do not leave each other to die.’

‘I am not the traitor,’ Garrius snaps.

Kovarny laughs. ‘You are not the loyal brother either.’

Garrius’ frown grows deep, and full, and acid as bile. ‘Maybe it was true, once. Maybe we were brothers. But this war has changed us all. You’re black hearts from a Traitor Legion, pillaging the Imperium we built. I’m the wall that protects it from nightmares like you.’ Garrius leans in. ‘I’ll do anything to protect it, Kove. Anything.’

A drumbeat of blasts perforates the wall. Overpressure hammers the air and light scythes into the darkness. Chemical smoke jets from the choking corridors into Cthonia’s burning sky.

Stormbirds hover into view, hulls golden-yellow, engines howling.

The Imperial Fists cross into their drop-ships, bolters chanting farewells to Kovarny’s pinned, scattered Heathens. Garrius turns to join them.

Kovarny’s two hearts pound unevenly. He was a fool. Garrius never understood brotherhood. He never would have turned no matter what Kovarny did. Garrius was a traitor from the start.

At that, Kovarny chuckles with epiphany. The madness of the scene is absurd and unsettling: a muscle-bound demigod encrusted in warplate, laughing, toppled by corroding hate, slave to resistless malice.

He’ll kill Garrius. He’ll kill the traitor. He lurches closer, dragging his broken body and savaged armour forwards, retrieving his chipped blade from the floor. He sweeps towards Garrius, coughing flash-coagulated blood, laughing out the crumbs of his teeth.

Kovarny lunges. Garrius swivels instinctively, turning Kovarny’s weight against him, throwing him through the breach in the superstructure.

Kovarny tumbles from Traitor’s Gate, spinning through burning skies. When he lands, it will be with meteoric force. The impact will jolt through his armour, gelling his miraculous anatomy into so much clotting meat, just like Ul-Buus. He knows this as certainly as he knows anything. He cannot hide from it.

But for one marvellous moment, the hive’s foundations swelling closer, Kovarny is assuaged by a single, bitter truth.

He was loyal to the end.

FOR HATE’S SAKE

GAV THORPE

For many there seems little difference between hate and anger, but they are opposites. Anger is quick, hot, explosive in its intensity. Hate is slow and cold, continually eroding that which it touches. Occasionally hate becomes anger, a short burst of externalised power, but the expulsion of that energy does not lessen the intensity of the emotion. Hate is most efficient when honed and directed, continually whetted by the psyche into a sharp instrument, concentrated and focused like a laser.

Brother Herikson Orlocki recalled the lesson from his days as an initiate as he watched the cutter hiss through the rusted metal of the access door bolts. The blue laser reflected green from the ochre armour of the Imperial Fist and his companions, the only light in the narrow passage. He glanced back, acutely aware of the noise from the cutter’s generator, even though Sergeant Tannkred and his squad guarded the approach from the level above. Latest reports had the enemy at least two hundred metres away, but a scouting party or new patrol with an auspex might pick up any one of a number of betraying signals emanating from the Imperial Fists breaching party; in the gloom of the hive bottom, heat and vibration would announce their presence long before any visual sighting.

‘Nearly through,’ said Garrol, the Techmarine. The servo-arm that extended from his expanded backpack swivelled down to the fuel valve of the cutter and adjusted it slightly. ‘Two to go.’

‘Orlocki,’ said Sergeant Vouk, grabbing one of the wheel locks. The legionary grabbed the other wheel, ensuring the heavy door would not fall. Even with his armour running on silent power he was more than strong enough to take the weight.

‘Done.’

Garrol turned off the cutter and stood, quietly transferring his weight as he stepped back. Orlocki saw Vouk give him a nod, and between the two of them they lowered the door to one side, away from the route through to the next chamber. Armour sensors passed on the cold breeze that emanated from the larger space beyond. The Techmarine switched on a suit lamp, the yellow beam playing over the hulking machine in the store bay they had uncovered. Three massive drill-heads with recessed melta-muzzles nestled at the front, below and to the left of the door, clustered in front of heavily cabled boxes that Orlocki took to be the seismic generators. Once operational the drill would burrow through ten metres of rock a second. The Imperial Fists would no longer be trapped between the Sons of Horus above and below. The war would turn in their favour.

There would be a great deal of anger released then. Much noise and violence. Until then Orlocki moved in the quiet, the silence part of his hate along with the cold and the dark.

To the last man.

To the last blood.

To the last breath.

Simple words that encapsulated a lifetime of service to death. Kazil Darg reached out to his armour on its stand, thick fingers gripping the parchment of the seal. With a quick jerk he ripped the red wax oath-seal from the ceramite. Paint came with it, revealing a slash of yellow beneath the grey-white of the pauldron. It had been his first Oath of Moment after becoming a Son of Horus, swearing allegiance to the Legion in its new guise; the symbol of the Luna Wolves had been just beneath the surface all of that time. But Darg had never set foot on Luna; he was a son of Cthonia like his Warmaster.

He reached for another seal, knowing by heart the words inked onto the parchment: his affirmation before the attack on Sixty-Three Nineteen. He knew others of the Tenth Company that had long since discarded theirs, the oath later profaned by the actions of the traitor Loken. Darg didn’t care much for such thoughts. His oath was his own, unsullied by the weakness of others.

A third seal followed, for the Orgaus Reclamation. An award rather than an oath, marked with the aquila of the Emperor Himself. Before Davin. Before Sixty-Three Nineteen. A year before Ullanor, even. Darg sneered as he ripped it away. How blind they had all been then, as their creator had intended. Lied to, destined to be dead or discarded on the altars of lesser mortals.

But Horus had shown them the truth.

A truth that had been ratified when the bastards of Dorn had tried to claim Cthonia as their own. But Darg and the others like him would never bend knee to an outsider, and their resistance had paid off. With the arrival of Captain Ashurhaddon’s companies the usurpers had already been driven from the upper hive, into the warrens of ancient ages that were the hunting grounds of Darg and his ilk. His people had not been born here in Lupercal’s Gate, but his father had led them to the promise of service to the ascendant king, battling across the territories of a dozen other gangs and tribes. Adagz had died in sight of his destination, killed by his own brother, and Darg had avenged him just moments later.

Now the oldest oath came to mind, as then: the words that he had sworn over his father’s corpse, the same he had heard spoken to him since he was born. More than an oath. A way of life. A way of death.

Just as the Luna Wolves heraldry lay beneath the veneer of the Sons of Horus, so Darg’s skin masked something deeper. His armour stripped of its Imperial fancy, now was time to renew the connection of flesh to world, of warrior to king.

He drew his combat blade down across brow and cheek on the left of his face, scoring a straight line. His blood thickened on the blade and congealed in the wound immediately, but it was enough to leave a scar, as it had done the first time, before his body had been remade.

‘To the last man.’

He cut another mark parallel to the first.

‘To the last blood.’

The third was diagonal from the bridge of the nose to the turn of the jaw. Thick droplets slid from the knife.

‘To the last breath.’

Footsteps had Darg turn towards the door. It was Tormak, the sergeant. More armoured forms lurked in the gloom beyond. Though he was not their leader, the others respected Darg as their most senior and even Tormak deferred to him on some occasions. Darg had never been drawn to command, not even of a squad, but in a narrow way his experience was greater than that of many a captain.

‘Plate on,’ said Tormak. ‘Word from Ashurhaddon. The usurpers are in the third vault deeps.’

‘So?’ said Darg, motioning to one of the arming servitors loitering in the shadows. It juddered into view and took up the first piece of warplate to be affixed to the legionary. ‘They overextend themselves.’

‘Maybe. But they’ve located a seismic drilling station, and the captain wants it for our side.’

The dried blood caking one side of Darg’s face cracked and flaked as his cheeks creased into a broad smile.

‘Keep them away from the drill-head.’

Orlocki didn’t need the command from Lieutenant Veermaf to understand the situation; the goal of the Sons of Horus had been obvious from the moment their first troops had thrust straight towards the rig’s control cabin. Heavy weapons fire was directed at the parts of the chamber away from the drill rig. Clearly they wanted it for themselves.

He assumed the clarification had been for the Cthonian recruits – thirteen of them stationed to the left and right of the main rig, the yellow paint of their armour barely weeks old having been applied during a hasty induction ceremony by Captain Garrius even as the newly arrived Sons of Horus forces had broken into the upper hive. They were raw as full legionaries but they were far from strangers to battle, having proven themselves as Scouts for the Legion, their tunnel-fighting instincts every bit as sharp as the Sons of Horus they had stalked and evaded for the past seven years.

Along with Sergeant Tannkred’s squad, Orlocki and the rest of Vouk’s warriors fired down at the traitors from a vantage point just in front of the main engine block. The first wave of Sons of Horus showed little regard for tactics, pouring through the broad main doors into the maintenance bay with a welter of constant but inaccurate fire. Their armour was mismatched, some of it unpainted blank ceramite, other pieces decades old, the heavy-duty bonding studs a feature of the earliest actions of the Great Crusade. Museum pieces, probably literally. They moved clumsily in their haphazard warplate, and not just because their suit systems were poorly synced. Orlocki had killed a few at close quarters before and seen that they were physically inferior to full legionaries. The Sons of Horus’ facilities had been limited and their patience short, and these poorly formed warriors were evidence of both.

He fired two more shots into the knot of grey-clad warriors pushing towards Lieutenant Veermaf on the left, across Orlocki’s line of fire. He ejected the empty magazine and reached for another. Though the Imperial Fists faced many issues, for the moment supplies were not numbered among them. They’d emptied the armouries as best they could before retreating, setting up caches deep inside the undercity where even the Sons of Horus could not find them.

During his brief cessation of fire, Orlocki heard the whirr of powered ratchets and the binharic chants of Garrol just a couple of metres behind him, as the Techmarine worked to get the old machine into action again. Occasionally his Mars-tongue was broken by recognisable words – Low Gothic invective. These seemed to accompany an increase in the tempo and volume of the hammering.

In the piloting cabin just ahead and to the left, two tech-adepts were working on the frozen control systems, with as much progress as Garrol judging by the frequent stops and hectic gestures of multiple limbs, both human and mechanical.

With fresh ammunition loaded Orlocki opened fire again, sending a trio of bolts into the faceplate of a traitor almost at the bottom of the ramp that led to the maintenance dock. Ceramite split and the renegade fell back, blood gouting from the fractured helm.

A sudden concussive wave boomed from the vicinity of the main doors and a single volley of bolts slammed into the rig, concentrated on the cabin. One tech-adept fell sideways out of the open door, half her head missing. The other turned just as a second volley erupted from the new wave of attackers. This, too, was focused on the cab, explosions shredding the interior and the tech-adept within.

At the door were ten fully armoured Sons of Horus. Orlocki knew enough to recognise their campaign markings immediately among the traitor slogans and other vile iconography. Crusade veterans, merciless and efficient.

Orlocki opened fire and voiced a few choice words of invective too.

The pilot cab now turned to ribbons and splinters, Kazil Darg and the rest of Tormak’s squad turned their guns on the Imperial Fists guarding the ramp that ran along the flank of the dormant rig. They fired over the heads of the nuvulk that battled hand-to-hand with Dorn’s sons near the foot of the ramp, targeting the Emperor’s servants firing down into the melee from the safety of the boarding platform. The newly engineered Sons of Horus were a useful distraction, but Darg considered them good for little else. Forced to compromise their stringent genetic testing, and the speed with which legionary enhancements had been implanted, the embattled Sons of Horus had allowed impurities to enter the genhancement regime. The gene-seed was pure still, but the implantees were not – the bowels of Cthonia held many toxic and radioactive elements that corroded the viability of recruits, and now those improperly screened faults were coming to the fore. Most of the nuvulk were fit enough for the job, but some had less mass than was proper, others had not quite the same heightened senses and reflexes – deficiencies normally weeded out during scrupulous physical and combat tests. It was totally unlike the gruelling years of enhancement and training that Darg had undergone only a few kilometres above this forgotten place.

These days, the war against the Imperial Fists was the test.

Others were worse, curved in spine and limb or suffering malgrowths of muscle tissue, but still able to fit into their scrap-plate armour. Like those ahead of Darg, they made useful shock troops and bolt fodder, their infirmities rendering them unable to operate as part of a coordinated firing team. Nobody really wanted to command them, so the nuvulk were treated as temporary auxiliaries, passed from company to company as needed or not. Most didn’t survive or stay in one place long enough to have markings on their painted livery, save for the Eye of Horus that united all of the defenders of Cthonia.

While Tormak’s veterans kept up a punishing barrage of fire, other Sons of Horus squads pushed into the maintenance station, breaking to the other side of the immense drilling machine. A despoiler heavy weapons squad led by Sergeant Khaddark could now target the Imperial Fists atop and around the drill’s engine housing, forcing them back towards the dark recesses of the hall with their opening salvo. With their own support fire reduced, the Imperial Fists holding the docking ramp withdrew from a renewed push by the nuvulk.

Tormak signalled the advance, but just at that moment an Imperial Fist reappeared on top of the drill engine, bolter levelled. In the gloom Darg thought he saw a spider painted in black upon a vambrace in the split second before the flare of bolt propellant snared his attention. He turned away from the shot but too late, the explosive projectile hitting the side of his helm’s prominent muzzle. Ceramite and glassite exploded into his eye as he reeled from the impact, sending daggers of pain through his face.

It was only a couple of seconds before he recovered from the shock, but in the time it took to swing his bolter up to reply in kind, the Imperial Fist had gone.

Orlocki found himself crouched in the darkness of the access passage again, but this time it was amid a fury of flickering bolts and the crack of detonations. A flurry of impacts shattered the breastplate of Kalliox. His battle-brother collapsed with a grunt of pain next to him, but he kept his focus on the Sons of Horus trying to push out from the drill station.

‘Hold!’ bellowed Lieutenant Veermaf as a ball of plasma spat from his pistol, lighting the corridor and armoured corpses as it flashed to the doorway. Its detonation sent a traitor initiate flying back, pieces of molten ceramite spraying across his companions.

Orlocki knew what was at stake. If they gave up this foothold next to the drill station they would lose any chance of retaking the boring engine.

He picked his shots despite the bolt-rounds cracking past and throwing shrapnel from the wall beside him. He was a soldier of the Emperor, an instrument of humanity’s will, and he would do his duty whatever it took. His next shot hit the faceplate of his target, breaking open the boar-like snout, shattering the jaw within. The Son of Horus returned fire and bolt-rounds cracked across the Imperial Fist’s plastron and pauldrons, but Orlocki’s aim did not waver. A second shot hit the ruined helm again, punching through flesh to shred the spine and brain. Headless, the armoured body fell, its crash lost among the other din of war.

It had been some time since they had last heard from Terra. He had to believe that the loyalists still held on, or perhaps even that the Emperor had destroyed Horus’ forces already, as surely He would. He did not consider this in the hope of relief arriving, but simply to acknowledge that he was part of something far vaster than a battle for a drilling machine. The lieutenant’s exhortations were not a call for the here and now but an echo of a command that rang out across the whole galaxy. Hold the traitors at every turn and grant them no easy advance. Every dead renegade was a victory of its own.

Orlocki could only imagine the vast wars raging in the Sol System and beyond, as far removed from this firefight as it was from the gang skirmishes of the Necromundan underhive that had been his first taste of bloodshed. And yet every war was nothing more than the conflicts of its constituent fighters. He had been trained to operate as part of a squad, which was alongside other squads as a company, arranged in the order of the Legion, itself one part of the forces of the Imperium and the Emperor. It did not feel like he battled to defend the soil of the Throneworld, yet he was part of that same struggle.

Firing again, immovable as the Sons of Horus counter-attack faltered, Orlocki felt the whole weight of the Imperial Fists leaning on him. Not as a burden but as support, holding him in place in a line tens of thousands long. And behind them the hand of the Emperor Himself to keep them in place. They were there not only by the creation of the Emperor and His alchemical genius, they were each an embodiment of an immortal, indomitable will. Whether on an airless moon, boarding a ship in the void or holding a dark corridor in the depths below an artificial mountain, wherever a Space Marine of the Emperor stood and fought, the Emperor stood and fought too.

Grunting heavily, Darg punched into the mask of the fallen Imperial Fist again, turning the broken ceramite into a bloody mess, blow after blow pulverising the face beyond recognition. His victim’s still-living companions withdrew, their latest attack blunted by the ferocity of the veterans’ immediate counter-attack. Darg stood, releasing his grip on the gorget of his dead foe. Someone shouted his name – Tharrd, standing beside the cabin between two yellow-armoured corpses.

‘This one?’

Darg turned so he could see with his good eye. Tormak had given him leave to withdraw for a bionic fitting, but Darg had declined. His place was here, in the fight. Tharrd held up the arm of one of the Imperial Fists, displaying a spider mark on the vambrace.

‘Wrong arm, and the spider had longer legs,’ said Darg, shaking his head.

Tharrd let the limb drop and kicked the body down the steps of the cab, clearing the way for the enginseers that had been brought in to revive the drill machine. They had to pick their way across armoured corpses and fallen masonry – the station bore the scars of the fighting as badly as the bodies of the combatants. Inside the cab, one of the adepts resumed their coaxing of the drill’s dormant machine brain and reluctant data-systems. Another resumed work on the engines, continuing the task that had been started by the Imperial Fists Techmarine.

‘Do you think they’ll give up yet?’ said Tharrd, jumping across to the track housing from which Darg examined the newly fallen Imperial Fists. There were no few Sons of Horus among them, two of them fellow veterans, but he felt nothing as his eye passed over their lifeless warplate.

‘That’s the third attack in nine hours, they’re not giving up until they’re dead or we are,’ replied Darg.

He’d made it known he wanted to be the one to take out the Imperial Fist who had taken his eye – if possible. He had been wounded before, but there had been something contemptuous about that parting shot that roused Darg’s ire. If he could, he would teach that upstart of Dorn that even a legionary’s body had limits to the pain it could withstand.

The crack of bolter rounds announced the Imperial Fists’ intent not to wait any longer, a squad with breaching shields appearing at the doorway behind the drill rig.

‘Not giving up,’ growled Darg, levelling his bolter but holding fire. There was no point wasting ammunition on the powered shields.

‘For the Warmaster!’ The shout was raised by the nuvulk as they charged the newcomers, hitting the shield wall with the same result as if they had thrown themselves at solid ferrocrete. The Imperial Fists held and then surged back, forcing an opening around the doorway over the bodies of half a dozen nuvulk, their bolter fire like the pikes of a phalanx of ancient days, slaying all that tried to stand before them.

The call of Horus’ Imperial title had once set Darg’s hearts beating faster, bursting with pride at being recognised as one of his sons, named in the Legion itself. If the Warmaster had been there, if King Lupercal had at that moment appeared and told him to hurl himself at the Imperial Fists, Darg would gladly have done so. But Horus was light years away, battling the Emperor on Terra, and in his absence Darg had felt his loyalty growing smaller. Not weaker, just contained to this place – his home, the warriors at his side. Now even that was not much to regard, tainted by the humiliation heaped on Cthonia by the Imperial Fists’ occupation.

Among the Imperial Fists that advanced in the wake of the breaching squad, he saw the familiar spider mark. Now his hearts started beating faster. Now there was something worth rousing himself for.

‘Die, you bastard rat-sons!’ he roared, charging along the drill’s track housing, bolter firing. The veterans followed him unthinkingly, attacking even as the nuvulk were falling back, catching the Imperial Fists as they established their manoeuvre. Darg leapt down to the ferrocrete floor, lowered a shoulder and bull-charged the closest foe, slamming his shield aside as fronds of power scrawled across the Son of Horus’ armour. Tharrd was a step behind, his bolter turning the plastron of the shield carrier to shattered ochre and crimson. Tormak jumped past a second later, exploiting the gap, his power sword slashing the arm from another breaching squad warrior.

The second line of Imperial Fists opened fire, but Darg ran into the storm of bolters, giving them no time for a second fusillade. He was fixed on the son of Dorn with the spider on his arm, and the others knew it, depending upon this to work out their own axes of attack. The Imperial Fists reacted slowly to the break in their protective line, giving Darg the chance he needed.

He fired point-blank into the torso of the Imperial Fist, using his bolts as a distraction while he pulled out his combat knife.

The Imperial Fist saw the threat and opened fire in return. Exploding warheads filled the narrowing space between them with fire and ceramic shrapnel.

At the last moment, the Imperial Fist lunged, smashing the muzzle of his bolter upwards into the damaged side of Darg’s helm. His knife missed its mark by a centimetre, plunging down into the clavicle rather than the artery in his foe’s throat. The Imperial Fist’s neighbour clubbed Darg backwards with his bolter, blood fountaining from the knife wound as he pulled his weapon free.

The moment passed. The boarding squad re-formed, and Darg was battered off the door platform half a dozen metres to the drill station floor. He landed heavily, opening fire as soon as he could, but the Imperial Fists had started to withdraw and his attacker was out of sight a couple of seconds later.

Back aching, face again throbbing with pain, Darg let his hand drop to his side, bolter still in its grip.

‘Next time!’ he called out, knowing his foe would survive the wound he had dealt. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Next time.’

The standard vox-channels were all compromised – on both sides – so Lieutenant Veermaf’s conversation with Captain Garrius took place on a bulky vox-coder set and was thus audible to everyone in the strike force gathered in the chamber just twenty metres from the drill station.

‘No, captain, they hold both the north and east entrances. We have the south but only just. Another counter-attack seems inviable at this stage.’

Orlocki stood watch at the drop down into the access tunnel, but there was no movement from the Sons of Horus. Why would there be? They held the drill and the continuing sounds of reactivation were obvious. It was just a matter of time before they succeeded and the Imperial Fists would have failed.

‘If I had legionaries to spare, Veermaf, I would not need the drill.’ The commander of the Imperial Fists’ reply crackled across the airwaves, distorted by encryption patterns. ‘We are losing mobility as we descend, and enemy numbers are having greater and greater effect.’

‘Understood, captain,’ said Veermaf. He motioned for Tagara to switch off the set and then stood up, turning to face the rest of his much-diminished command.

‘We have one last effort, one last chance to achieve something glorious for the Legion,’ he said, but there was a tone to his voice that betrayed the hollowness of this sentiment.

This was not like Orlocki’s first battle as a full legionary, when he had crossed the fields of Condori beneath a gold-threaded standard, the massed guns of the company driving the enemy before them. This battle was akin to the squalid skirmishes and knife fights of his youth, a series of swift yet brutal exchanges. There was no glory here, he realised, and he suspected neither was there place for honour. This was a tunnel fight, not a battle. Thinking of his days in the underhive brought something to mind.

‘I have an idea, lieutenant,’ he said, gesturing for Candric to take his place at the hatch. The two legionaries swapped positions. ‘This is a heist, not a battle.’

Veermaf looked at him for several seconds and it was obvious the Terran-born officer did not understand.

‘All we need is the drill,’ explained Orlocki. ‘We need to wait until the traitors have it working and then seize it. The drill is how we get out of here.’

‘And if we fail, we let them have the drill when it is fully operational.’

‘That’s true whatever we try, lieutenant.’

Veermaf conceded the point with a nod. ‘I concur. But the Sons of Horus will give everything to stop us, and they have the advantage of position and defence. They know where we are coming from and what we are trying to seize. We need to draw them out, away from the rig.’

Veermaf went on to order two-thirds of the force to stand ready to attack the eastern access gate, but this was to be the diversion for an attack through the nearby north access. It was risky, sending the greater strength of the Imperial Fists away, but anything less would be spotted as a ruse. Fortunately the station structure and the activated boring machine would block auspexes on both sides, so the part of the force remaining in place would be hard to detect even as they made their move. With the vox out of operation, Veermaf would lead the second team, deciding when to strike. Sixty seconds after their attack had started – a full assault that would force the Sons of Horus to mass against them – the ‘heist’ squad was to make straight for the control cabin to commandeer the drill.

Orlocki watched the other squads quietly leaving. If the Sons of Horus had the slightest idea what was happening, they would sweep away the remaining fourteen legionaries without too much issue and come on the other force from behind. There was nothing to be done except wait until the first shots were fired. Once again the darkness and silence were their best allies.

The seconds became minutes, the minutes became an hour. Orlocki and the others were as still as statues, only their warplate senses active to minimise heat and signal dispersion. Orlocki noticed a rat crawl across his foot. It was easily half a metre long in the body, its fur crackling with static discharge from the legionary’s power pack. Warty growths pocked the rodent’s back and flanks, one eye a milky white. It scurried down the corridor, oblivious to the statue-like Imperial Fists. So, it seemed, were the Sons of Horus.

As the chronometer passed the ninety-four-minute mark, the stillness broke with a petrochemical cough of ancient engines reverberating from below, stuttering for a few seconds before becoming a throatier, constant snarl.

Orlocki flexed a fraction, bringing his armour’s mobility functions back to imminent potential. Readings – all in green – faded from his visor view. Behind him the sigh of actuators betrayed the small movements of the others.

‘Wait,’ said Sergeant Vouk, the whisper from his external address no louder than the distant hiss of fans and background thrum of atmospheric recyclers.

Several more seconds passed and the massive engine continued its growl. Success with the engine did not signify control, though. It would be up to Lieutenant Veermaf to decide whether the drill was ready or not.

Another minute passed and the tone of the engine changed to a higher pitch as someone increased the revolutions. Orlocki felt rather than saw or heard his squad-brothers tensing. It seemed likely that the engine speed was being altered from the cabin.

The crack of bolters, vague with distance, followed just under ten seconds later.

‘Wait,’ Vouk reminded them as armour creaked in the blackness.

A louder, deeper detonation of grenades and the rapid thunder of an autocannon firing. That would be Forask, thought Orlocki. He imagined silvery-grey ceramite shattering under the impact of the high-calibre rapid-fire rounds.

‘Go!’

Vouk was on his feet and jumping down the hatch a split second later, trusting to the alertness of his squad. Laque followed and then Orlocki, thudding onto the shrapnel-pitted ferrocrete, following with long strides along the passage and through the station’s upper access.

Vouk opened fire, plasma chewing through the chestplate of a Sons of Horus novitiate just a few metres inside the portal – one of three that were still keeping watch, but distracted by the firefight raging on the other side of the drill hall. The second and third turned, taken totally unawares, the combined volley of the arriving Imperial Fists cracking open ad-hoc warplate, sending them tumbling back down the access ramp.

Vouk and Laque set up a fire point while Orlocki and Deragne continued down the ramp towards the drill cab. Standard doctrine was to hold position at five-metre intervals, so that in pairs the squad would close on their objective. Several Sons of Horus had already turned back from the squads pushing out towards the diversionary attack, alerted to the threat at the north entrance. Orlocki felt a twitch in his injured shoulder as he saw a Sons of Horus veteran with a steel-patched eyeplate leaping up towards him – the one that had come for him before with single-minded, murderous intent. Others followed behind, heading to cut off the Imperial Fists’ approach to the rig.

‘Objective priority secure,’ barked Orlocki, overriding his sergeant’s commands. ‘Suppression!’

He sprinted down the ramp, not even pausing to fire. Bolts from his companions hissed past, the clump of Deragne’s boots just metres behind.

A tech-adept in dark red robes stepped out of the cab, gleaming pistol in hand. Deragne fired past Orlocki, one bolt ripping apart a head half-made of metal and crystal. Orlocki pushed into the confines of the cabin a moment later, grabbing the wrist of a second Dark Mechanicum priest as it swung a glittering knife. A split-second examination of the control console revealed it to be similar to those of a Rhino or Predator. Standard Template Construct rendered many systems instantly familiar. The dials were on idle and the main ignition switch had not yet been activated.

‘No!’ rasped the acolyte as it guessed Orlocki’s intent. Bolts sparked from the frame of the cab, and through the cracked window he saw the Sons of Horus veteran vault the rail to the ramp, just metres away. ‘There has been too much–’

Orlocki smashed his elbow into the adept’s face, snapping its neck and crushing the brainpan against the back of the cab. His other hand slapped the main ignition switch, sending a flood of power surging through the engine. The machine shuddered and the whine of secondary motors tore the air. Right in front of Orlocki, the Sons of Horus veteran jumped onto the broad housing that contained the drill motor.

Everything lurched sideways with a massive screech of breaking ferrocrete and buckling metal. The drill tipped hard to the left, pitching the Son of Horus out of sight as Orlocki crashed across the cab. He felt the sudden pull of gravity as the drill fell and masonry rained down with him, a flash of yellow armour and grey amongst the tumult of the drill station’s collapse.

Reflexes forged in a laboratory and honed in countless battles sent Darg’s hand towards the grille of the plummeting rig, ceramite-sheathed fingers knifing through metal to close around the main strut of the drill-motor casing. The rumbling of crushing masonry drowned out the shouts of his companions and enemies but the vox was full of them, insistent and booming in his ear, until they were not – dozens of voices cut short in seconds.

The rig hit a mound of slag and broke, the drill bit careening wildly down one slope while the engine and cab spun the other way. Darg pulled himself into the gap between motor housing and serrated drill bit, armour locked as the mass spun over and over and over. One wrong collision would smash him against the titanium-edged boring teeth, slicing him apart surer than his gene-father’s lightning claws.

The housing sheared away on another hit. The void he had found no longer existed and he let go of the engine block, pushing himself away from the lethal cutting head. He fell another few metres before slamming hard into sloped ferrocrete, tumbling past a litter of tank-sized hunks of fallen masonry and broken armour. Metal shrieks slashed along his nerves as the drill bit came to rest a few score metres away. Lying motionless, looking up, for a few brief seconds Darg saw dim light about three hundred metres up, before shifting layers of debris formed a new ceiling and the darkness enveloped him.

He knew immediately what had happened. The drill station must have been built around the boring machine’s last position rather than it being moved into the hall. Underneath had remained the tunnel dug by the machine, such foundations that had been laid across it weakened by time and the heavy weapons fire of the brutal fight for the rig. When the drill engine had been brought to full power the vibration had been enough to break what had been left, dropping the station into the maze of tunnels below.

Somewhere there might be a way out, a passage or mineshaft that led back to the hive bottom, but it was just as likely that Darg was completely cocooned in here. He heard the rattle of falling stones, echoing from several directions at once. A last murmur of the engine faded to silence.

There might be a way out, but Darg had other plans. The cab was down here somewhere and that meant the Imperial Fist with the spider mark was too. He had been in the driver’s cabin when the calamity had struck, Darg had seen him through the cracked window. Alive or dead, he was not far.

Standing up, stiff inside his armour, Darg looked around. There was little light for even auto-senses to use, but thermal mode detected enough gleam from his right to indicate the heat of the engine, though it was out of sight. They seemed to be in a series of linked chambers and caves, a few of them now sharing the same space because of the roof cave-in. The best way to get anywhere would be to climb, but the rubble would be highly unstable in places.

Darg risked a flash of his suit lamp, a second of yellowish illumination dimmed by his auto-senses so that he was not blinded. It gave him just enough to plot a rough route from the slab he was on to the first crest of the landslip.

Nearly blind, he groped his way forward until he had his hands on the broken masonry. Armour whining softly around him, he started to climb.

A skip in the visor chronometer warned Orlocki that he had lost consciousness for just under twelve seconds. Electrical sparks across the instrument display highlighted his immediate environs. He found himself wedged against the back of the driver’s cabin, the engine block below him, the shattered remains of the front window above. The sticky mess all over his armour was presumably the tech-adept that had been in there with him as they had rolled and bounced during the long drop.

His warplate had fared better than most of the cab, which in places was buckled up around his ceramite like a fitted cage. Orlocki could free his left hand and pushed, bending the metal away. Having prised himself some room to work, he looked for his bolter but found nothing. With both hands he was able to tear back the roof of the cab, giving himself a step from which he could push himself through the frame of the front window onto the jagged metal where the drill housing had originally connected to the main body. There was space above and his suit detected a suitable atmosphere, which was well because Orlocki became aware of a jabbing pain in the left side of his skull where the helm had broken and a jag of ceramite had cut through flesh into bone. Wincing, he tried to take off his helm but it was stuck fast. With the fingers of his left hand he twisted the shard of ceramite, feeling it biting into his head with every degree of turn.

Sensing it loosen, he grabbed his helm in both hands and took a deep breath. Blood gushed from the wound as he ripped the helm free, a grunt of pain escaping pursed lips. Soon his body’s superior clotting abilities staunched the flow, and the pain disappeared in a flood of warplate-administered stimms and boosted hormones. He pulled out the vox-system and hooked it over one ear.

Two of the rig’s external lumens were still working. Pale blue light stuttered across an irregular dome about twenty metres high and thirty across. The bulk of the engine block was buried in rubble, but deeper shadow indicated a space where two girders had met, forming a rough arch. Orlocki lowered himself down, one hand pulling his combat knife from his belt as he ducked into the shadow. Beyond was a passageway lined with cut stone, part of the underhive architecture.

He gave a subvocal command that activated the vox-pickup.

‘Is anybody alive down here?’ he asked. ‘This is Orlocki. Respond if you can. Any survivors?’

The vox hissed for several seconds before a reply came. The voice that spoke was deep, with the harshness of a Cthonian accent.

‘Orlocki?’ it rasped, edged with cruel mirth. ‘I’m still alive. Don’t be impatient. I’ll find you soon enough.’

Navigating across the broken landscape, Darg found that his auto-senses were more interference than enhancement and slipped off his helm. He carefully placed it to one side, making no noise while he waited for his unassisted eyes to adjust to the gloom. Even then he had only the barest idea of his surroundings, the darkness almost total. The air was thick with dust, clogging his nostrils as he took in a deep draught of air. As well as the powdered ferrocrete he caught the smells of oil and refined promethium from the ruptured lines of the drill, and the familiar rankness of his own thick sweat. Feeling the dust caking on his hands, he rubbed at his face, using the cloud to absorb the moisture, caking his skin in grey and brown. There was nothing he could do about the lubricant in his armour, but he figured his prey’s own warplate and the background stench from the broken rig would mask it. The same pulverised rock coated his livery, masking it against casual sight.

Sound would be key. His auto-senses could detect frequencies beyond normal human hearing, but Darg needed to hear as a hunter, not filtered through a machine-coded earpiece. For too long he had stood in battle lines, deafened to the roar of great guns and the cries of the dying. One of many, one of a Legion. Now he was himself again, alone against the foe, not part of a spearhead or rearguard, not a Son of Horus or a legionary but a creature of the deep dark.

The lessons from the Warmaster had never overridden the instincts honed down here. Darg’s world became a soundscape, each settling boulder and scraping slab taking its place in his impression of his surrounds. He moved with deliberate slowness, at times almost immobile as he settled an armoured boot onto loose gravel, hands held up, body twisted for perfect balance to transfer weight seamlessly from one foot to the other. When he climbed, he did so one limb at a time, each movement exaggerated, elbows and knees far from the stony slope to prevent any scratch or disturbance. What he could have bounded up in seconds took minutes to traverse, but patience was one of his greatest weapons. Focused entirely on the kill, he spared no thought for escape or evasion.

‘Softly, softly,’ he breathed into the vox-pickup in the collar of his warplate. He hoped to spur the Imperial Fist into a mistake, distracting him at a vital moment or forcing his patience. So far his goading had not been rewarded. ‘Trapped, eh, Dorn-scum? Looking for a way out? Nobody is coming, there is no aid. They are all dead. Your gene-brothers. You are the last, and when I am done, I will find my way out and kill more of your Legion.’

His quarry doubtless drew strength from the idea that his companions were seeking him. The Imperial Fist would elude as best he could, or find somewhere to lie low until assistance reached him. Darg took strength from his isolation. It was simply a confirmation of the Cthonian existence.

The taunts of the traitor were irritating, but they contained a truth that Orlocki had to confront. Even if there were survivors from the station collapse, they would be in no position to help. The lower levels into which they had fallen were effectively sealed, and the vox signal had been poor enough to start with. So he faced a choice – look for a way out or resolve to confront his opponent. Orlocki could feel the pain in his shoulder where the veteran’s blade had pushed through the muscle, and his body was starting to ache in dozens of places, even through the suppressants. His warplate was like a second skin, but that did not make him immune to the effects of gravity and momentum. There was quite possibly internal damage from the main impact.

There was certainly no obvious route out in the immediate surrounds of the rig. If Orlocki were to set out, which direction would he take? He had a vague notion of where the drill part had fallen, but that was all. For all that he knew, his foe was just metres away, around a heap of debris or lying in wait at the corner of a half-exposed corridor. Using a light would be too risky, and without the visor display of his helm he would have to rely on direction and position sense to keep an idea of where he was going – with no starting reference point other than the rig, even those highly attuned senses would be tested.

He had to assume that staying close to the cab would make him easier to find. On the other hand, that also gave him a little insight into where his enemy might be, as it made for a natural objective to move towards.

There was also the distinct possibility that the traitor was lying, pinned to a slab of rockcrete by a stanchion, unarmed and vulnerable, trying to bluff his way out of his predicament.

Too many variables, Orlocki decided. He could not let the vox taunts influence his analysis.

As he considered the issues he widened his search area, moving slowly in a spiral out from the piloting cabin, moving through ancient ductways and over collapsed floors from above.

He stopped after a couple of minutes, sensing a coolness on his exposed cheek. Slowly turning one way and then the other, he felt a draught coming from the haphazard pile of stones to his right. Bending to the rubble he listened, catching the faintest judder of a circulation fan somewhere in the distance.

As best he could reckon, half a tonne or more of masonry had fallen across the ventilation conduit. He could dig through in moments or it could take minutes. He was certain that if it were the latter, his enemy would hear the noise and recognise what was happening. It was doubly dangerous because his labours, even if taken with care, would absorb his attention, offering his opponent the chance to approach without detection. The risk had to be weighed against the potential advantage that would come from breaking out of this dark, chaotic mess, and also the slim but valuable potential of forging a route back to the Imperial Fists’ territories nearly half a kilometre above.

Orlocki reached out a tentative hand to test how easily he could move the rubble.

Darg knew that the silence on the vox wasn’t born of fear. The Imperial Fist was incapable, just as he was. Beneath the skin, among the gristle and the blood and the biochemicals, the two of them were the same, engineered identically. But that was not what counted. It was the mind, the person, the experience that made a legionary. In that regard Darg considered himself and the Dorn-son as different as orks and aeldari.

‘I killed my first enemy before there was hair on my body,’ growled the Son of Horus. ‘I stalked him for half a cycle, staying close but not too close, waiting for the right moment. When he stopped, I stopped. When he ate, I ate. When he pissed, I pissed. I was his shadow and he never saw me. A blade, you see. Quick, silent, deadly. His gun-mates never knew I was there until they found the corpse, and then I was already gone. Their shouts, my laughter. I still have his ear somewhere. That wasn’t my training, you see. That was just life here in the dark beneath Lupercal’s Gate.’

He spoke quietly as he advanced in a crouch, ducking beneath a beam that had fallen across an old hallway. Darg knew he could not scare his foe, but he could still get into his head, make him betray where he was or spike his anger into a rash act that the Son of Horus could exploit.

‘You came to our world and thought you could be kings here.’ Despite his rising emotion Darg kept his words quiet. ‘You took our spire, our pride, our offspring! You deserve none of it! You haven’t scratched your way up from the bedrock of this place, haven’t clawed and stabbed your way into the light from the dark below – you know nothing of what it means to rule as a Cthonian.’

The residual heat wash grew stronger in his thermal view, pulling him along the maze of half-tunnels and piled debris. Darg knew better than to approach directly, into a possible ambush. Instead he moved laterally now and then to get a sense of distance and position. He thought he heard the occasional thud of stone on stone, perhaps just settling debris, but perhaps something else.

‘You change the name of our lord’s palace to Traitor’s Gate but see no irony in stealing our world, our youth, for yourselves. It was He on Terra that first broke the bond. He took our king and made us slaves with golden chains. Cthonia has already given up everything beneath the earth for mankind, all it has left is flesh to offer, but that was not enough. We have conquered hundreds of worlds, but what have we earned for our descendants? Nothing! No fresh pastures beneath blue skies for the sons and daughters of Cthonia. No new mines from rich rock for them. Not even the memorial of a warrior’s death. He on Terra wanted us harsh and broken, desperate to escape this endless gloom, but He reckoned not that from us our king would grow so strong of will.’

He had spied the rough location of the engine from atop the first mound, though there had been no direct route, just a trail of heat and a few scattered pieces of housing that led to a solid mass of fallen rubble. It was about thirty, forty metres from Darg, a little lower than his current position.

‘We’ve clung on and fought you for years, refusing to die, to submit, but you don’t have the strength to do the same. This is not Terra, this is not Inwit. What do you care of this dust and rock drained of all its worth? A mission, a duty, a burden. You don’t even want to be here. It is our home, and that is why we will prevail.’

Darg could see a shallow dip and piles of broken stones around it. Signs of excavation. He moved in, readying for the kill.

A slither of grains, almost inaudible, warned Darg of the danger. He threw himself aside as masonry cascaded towards him, leaping over a half-buried stanchion to skitter and slide down a toppled metal deck buckled and pitted from age and collapse. He hit the drift of broken rubble at the bottom and powered into a run, choppy strides, dodging left and right, expecting the roar of a bolter to sound out behind him at any second. Only when he had covered two dozen metres and thrown himself through a rusted metal grate into an access passage did he stumble to a stop and take stock. Glancing back through the opening he heard the distant, distorted crunch of armoured boots, far above.

The vox crackled next to his ear.

‘You are mistaken, traitor,’ whispered the Imperial Fist. ‘I am exactly where I want to be.’

Orlocki cursed the loose footing that had betrayed him just seconds before the Son of Horus had been in position. He knew well enough that the first strike he made could be the only one. The traitor veteran had disappeared somewhere to the south, but Orlocki was not sure how far. For the present, silence reigned again; just the creak of settling debris and the wheeze of his armour broke the stillness.

‘You are not special,’ he told the Son of Horus. ‘This place is not special. I took my first breaths on a world not so different to this one. I grew up among the layers of previous ages, my family scavenging a life out of the detritus of past generations.’

Escape was out of the question now. His opponent was too close. The chances of a second ambush were slim, but Orlocki took some reassurance from the thought he had considered the same of his first attempt but had come so close. Perhaps he had internalised the words from the Son of Horus, his confidence eroded by the boasting though he had believed he paid it no mind.

That could work both ways.

‘The Imperial Fists reckon their years by the count on Terra, and by that scale I was six years old when I first pulled a trigger with deadly intent. A scrap-thief who thought he could take our pitch on an archeotech seam below the Eldendome. I put a las-bolt into the back of his head as he crept up on my mother with an autopistol. I don’t have a trophy, but my father sold the body to the corpsegrinders and we were able to survive a while longer.’

Orlocki moved as he spoke, careful not to walk with rhythm that would be recognised as steps, sometimes taking two paces in succession, then waiting a few seconds before taking another, always scanning his environment, straining every sense for the slightest hint of his foe. He moved towards a faint scraping sound, taking bearings on the direction and distance by moving a dozen metres to his left and then back across his path to the right. Occasionally a rumble testified to the instability of the rubble mass, both above and below.

‘I have never seen open sky or breathed fresh air,’ he told the traitor, realising it for the first time. ‘When Dorn’s Legion took me from the underhive it was to a training facility in the hive city, and from there to an orbiting fortress. Even when I set foot upon a world’s surface, it was beneath a city dome of glassite raised by the Mechanicum, sheened with tri-grams that obscured storm clouds of methane. I’ve not looked upon the stars, not even from a ship’s ports or the heights of Traitor’s Gate. I was brought to these tunnels to hunt vermin. That is my purpose, you see? That was the first lesson, the most important lesson. Let no traitor live. I was made to hunt monsters like you.’

The scratching and scraping was distinct from the other noises, insistent and repeated rather than random. A large wall had plunged from above and landed almost intact, nearly ten metres high and several dozen metres long. The sound was coming from the other side.

Darg caught the scent of another legionary, lifting his head like a hunting cat. The smell of blood and oil was unmistakable and close. To his left was a long section of wall. The continuous sheet of ferrocrete had fallen intact to split open a section of tunnels yet dividing the spread of rubble that had been created. Stopping, he heard scrapes on the stone and the soft wheeze of actuators.

Warplate.

He could see little, but what light there was from the gaps overhead showed him a relatively easy route down into the ‘street’ created by the wall. He followed it with painstaking care, measuring each tread, listening for any telltale thud of footfall or the whine of power armour at full potential.

Something moved about twenty metres ahead and Darg froze, eyes averted in case their whiteness caught the light and betrayed him. With slow patience he raised a hand, first to waist height, then level with his rib, up to his shoulder, centimetre by centimetre, sliding it up to his brow as he turned his head, finally to cover his eyes but for a slit between armoured fingers. He waited, immobile, and saw the movement again. It came with a sigh of artificial muscles, and he knew that his prey was at hand.

He faced a choice: stealth or speed? He judged the distance to his prey – who seemed to be crouched or sat on a bank of debris – to be about thirteen or fourteen metres. Too far for a rush attack given that his opponent’s reactions were as enhanced as his own.

As deliberately as everything else he had done in the last hour, Darg moved forward, close to the wall, careful not to silhouette himself against the faint illumination.

He covered the last seven metres in one leap, fist raised.

The blow never fell.

Trapped in the rubble was an Imperial Fist, his legs and body crushed, pierced by rebar. Blood caked the side of his head from a cracked skull and one eye was swollen shut with bruising. The son of Dorn turned his head at the noise, good eye wide with surprise, but he let out no sound. A hand fumbled at the rubble and Darg’s eye was drawn to a bolt pistol just out of the legionary’s reach.

Darg stooped, taking his time so that he made no more noise now than before, fingers moving for the pistol.

‘Shout for him,’ he whispered, so gently the words barely carried to the stricken Space Marine. ‘Shout for your brother.’

Darg’s fingers tapped across the metal of the bolt pistol, questing for the grip, his eyes fixed on the Imperial Fist staring at him. There was still defiance there. He would not betray himself and his Legion brother.

‘Your primarch would be proud,’ Darg breathed, the fingers of his free hand clamping onto the Space Marine’s throat, pushing against the windpipe. His other fingers curled around the pistol.

Just at that moment the Son of Horus saw something in the Imperial Fist’s eye. Not an expression, but a sudden darkness, the shadow of something atop the wall behind Darg.

The moment he had pulled himself up onto the wall, Orlocki had seen Sergeant Tannkred smashed amongst the detritus of the collapsed station. His first instinct had been to see if he could aid the squad leader, but a more ruthless, practical voice had stopped him before he had dropped down.

Instead, he had lain atop the wall for eighteen minutes, ears blocking the sounds from Tannkred in an attempt to pick out the approach of his enemy. The Son of Horus would hear Tannkred’s feeble struggles sooner or later, and it was better to know the area of contact than continue to blindly paw through the rubble for his foe.

Eighteen minutes of watching Tannkred grow weaker and weaker, blood bubbling from his mouth like black sludge in the dim light. But for the last seven minutes his patience had been rewarded by the slow creep of his enemy, drawn to the movement of Tannkred like a spider on a web, except it was Orlocki that was the waiting predator. Now and then he lost the vague outline of the veteran and his hearts raced a little faster until he appeared again, almost invisible against the fractured rockcrete and bent steel.

Orlocki picked his moment, easing himself back to a crouch before finally dropping down onto his prey.

The veteran spun, faster than even a legionary’s reactions allowed.

He had Tannkred’s pistol in his hand.

Orlocki was committed, combat knife plunging towards the neck of the Son of Horus.

The Imperial Fist thrust out a hand to grab his opponent’s wrist as the pistol muzzle swung towards his face. Likewise, the veteran’s fingers closed around Orlocki’s arm, the knife point centimetres from exposed skin.

The two braced like that, arms locked against each other, teeth gritted with strain as transhuman muscles strained against each other. There was delight in the eyes of his enemy.

‘What is your name?’ Orlocki asked. ‘I feel I know you so well, but not your name.’

‘Kazil Darg. That’s the name of your killer,’ spat the Son of Horus. His hand twisted, edging the bolt pistol around a few degrees more. A shot now would graze the side of Orlocki’s head. ‘You’re nothing. A usurper.’

‘Yes, without you, I am nothing,’ Orlocki admitted. He adjusted his weight a fraction, pushing the knife a centimetre closer to his target. ‘Killing traitors gives me purpose. It is enough.’

The ground shuddered beneath them, but neither legionary allowed the slightest flex in their grip. Darg stared hard into the eyes of the Imperial Fist. The face looked young, but there was depth in that other gaze he had not expected. He could not have been a legionary for more than a few years, but Darg could feel the hate emanating from Orlocki as though he had fought a lifetime. What had they put into his mind for such hate to prosper?

The floor shifted again. Rubble slipped down the slope. The trapped Imperial Fist groaned as stones and girders shifted. Plaster cracked along the wall behind him.

The expressions of both warriors changed subtly, each reacting to their predicament. But there was no weakness or relent in either of them. Orlocki sneered and pushed harder, getting the knife another half a centimetre closer to Darg’s throat. But the veteran Son of Horus had recognised the intent and gained his own advantage, slipping his foot back a little to give him more leverage on the pistol side. He employed that to turn the muzzle a little more, ceramite creaking in the grip of his foe. For all that, the changes were incrementally small and both combatants could have been cast from plasteel.

Gravel pattered like rain and a fresh dust cloud descended from the unstable roof. A chunk the size of Darg’s head crashed to the ground just to his right, larger pieces grinding and scraping above.

‘Only in death does duty end,’ said Orlocki.

Darg smiled grimly.

‘To the last man. To the last blood. To the last breath.’

POSTULANT

CHRIS FORRESTER

Karael stood quiet in the juddering darkness.

The restraint harness fastened him in place, crimson overheads the only light source in the drop pod’s cramped confines. Flak bursts popped and thudded beyond the petal-doors, sharp intakes of breath in the hateful shriek of their descent. The Dark Angel checked his bolter’s ammunition count, teeth gritted in a wolfish grin.

‘We have come,’ his brothers whispered. ‘We are death.’

Adrenaline fired Karael’s blood, blending with the chemical cocktails administered by his battleplate. The whisper resolved into a chant, a statement of intent, growing in strength and surety like a cyclone gathering its power moments before touchdown.

‘We have come. We are death.’

Orbiting warships broadcast it to every active Cthonian vox-frequency and data-net. Librarians saturated astropathic ducts with it, risking their sanity so the warp itself screamed their oath and Horus’ honourless traitors would know who came for them.

The Dreadwing were not shy about their purpose.

‘We have come. We are death.’

Karael held his silence. He was a postulant, his void-black armour bare of heraldry beyond the winged sword and the battle honours inscribed on his greaves. He had not earned the right to voice the chant or wear the skull-in-hourglass. But that did nothing to curb the grim pleasure he took at the prospect of exterminating Horus’ mongrels.

‘Brothers, the glass is turned.’ Lieutenant Annael’s voice cut through the chant like a whetted blade, hatred barbing every syllable. ‘Let the grains fall.’

The drop pod slammed into the ground, its impact jarring Karael’s bones. He hammered his restraint harness’ release. Tanis, the Interemptor opposite him, triggered his own release and hefted a plasma burner, its coils glowing neon blue. Bullets and las-bolts sparked against superheated ceramite, the cooling hiss muted by environment seals. He murmured a vow to the Lion and raised his bolter. Release charges popped.

Sickly grey light washed into the pod.

‘We have come!’ the Dreadwing roared. ‘We are death!’

Karael emerged, firing.

His first kill was a Legion serf in padded flak armour, Horus’ slitted eye daubed gold on the breastplate. Mass-reactive rounds bisected him. Two more pitched sideways from his second volley, ribcages blown open, shredded offal evacuating messily onto the street.

Gouts of ionised plasma hissed from Tanis’ weapon, his fire blending with the other Interemptors of Squad Derwyn as they reformed. Traitors vanished in wheezing puffs of ash or detonated in fleshy plumes from Karael’s bolts.

‘Secure the landing zone.’ Praefectus Derwyn’s voice was a mess of tics and whirs, his throat and torso entirely reconstructed with augmetics. ‘Second wave inbound.’

‘For the Lion,’ Karael echoed the squad’s affirmation.

He ejected a spent magazine and slapped a fresh one into place. The Interemptors fanned out across an open area surrounded by squat habs and dilapidated tenements. It had been a residential sector millennia ago. Cheap plastek frames were split and bowed, riddled with bullet holes and faded scorch marks. The enemy swarmed towards them, taking firing positions behind collapsed walls and in abandoned residences.

They chanted.

The words carried over crashing bolters and autoguns, the venomous hiss of plasma discharge, the fatty sizzle and wet wrench of violated flesh. Bullets and las-bolts hissed and snapped against his armour, scorching thumbnail-sized dents into it. He paid them no mind, fury misting any rational thought. Vox-horns boomed the words through gargoyle-mouthed grilles. They dragged grief and pain from the iron curtain he penned them behind and set him snarling like one of Angron’s beasts.

‘The Emperor is dead. The Emperor is dead.’

Karael strode into the fire, undaunted, his bolter’s targeting systems slaved to his retinal feed. Reticules swamped his vision, each locked onto a different irritant. A bullet bit into the joint ribbing between his pauldron and plastron. His bolts shredded a Cthonian ganger with snub-pistols, the armour’s sensorium screeding bio-analytics beside reticules in serifed script that sizzled away with each kill. Two men fell apart like rotten meat. His chainsword decapitated a young woman with eight-pointed stars branded into her cheeks.

It was not enough. It would never be enough.

‘Where are the Sons?’ one Interemptor, Mathias, growled. He tossed a rad grenade into a clutch of traitor Auxilia. Its detonation scorched armour to dust and reduced mortals to weeping, shambling horrors of liquefying flesh and muscle.

‘Focus on the enemy,’ Derwyn clicked. ‘Second wave due in one minute.’

Karael grunted his agreement, disembowelling a renegade Cthonian headhunter with a lazy sweep of his chainsword. He cut both arms from a ganger with diamantine-tipped drills instead of forearms. A heart shot obliterated him. Karael mag-locked his chainsword and reloaded, wincing when an Auxilia officer’s powered blade clipped his side. He crushed the woman’s throat, fear and breathlessness bulging her eyes as her skin purpled.

The Dreadwing advanced, utterly relentless.

They shrugged off small-arms fire, blood and lubricant dribbling down void-black plate where a joint was pierced or cabling damaged. Rad-missiles scoured habs and tenement flats with lethal shards. Sunfire bursts from plasma burners and Mathias’ plasma incinerator vaporised traitor soldiers and reduced vehicles to shimmering pools of radioactive slag. They would let nothing live, and Karael relished such purity of purpose.

It did not stop the chant.

‘The Emperor is dead. The Emperor is dead.’

It boomed from the vox-horns, the speaker-servitor’s flat and charmless warble more animated than any Karael had heard before. It was the death rattle of those Guard traitors and Cthonian gangers dull-witted enough to contest the Dreadwing’s landing. His chainsword tore every throat that forced the words between bloodied lips, impaled every heart that did not repent their treachery in their final moments. It seemed an endless task.

‘Can we not put an end to that filth?’ he asked.

Derwyn crushed a mewling ganger’s head beneath his boot.

‘No,’ he clicked, wiping blood and bone fragments onto nearby rubble. ‘That is not our task, postulant.’

Karael nodded and executed a chem-bulked ganger whose sweat reeked of combat narcotics. His ears pricked at the piercing whine of descending turbines. He turned to watch four Stormstrikes escort a gilt-edged Stormbird towards the landing zone. Gunships streaked through flak-strewn skies, delivering Dark Angels into battle against the traitors. A handful fell, but many made it through.

The Stormbird’s ramp dropped.

Annael disembarked before the engines had finished cycling down. The lieutenant, a close confidant to Marduk Sedras, wore Cataphractii warplate edged in Martian red-gold, the winged sword emblazoned on the breastplate and greaves in glittering garnet and alabaster. The Dreadwing’s sigil was worked into their pommels, rendered in chips of pure jet. A cream tabard snapped in the wind and silver chains suspended censers and ornamental keys from his waist.

His Naufragia followed him, each Terminator clad in Cataphractii warplate, plasma blasters raised and Calibanite warblades trailing lethal energies. Two Interemptor squads followed them, the bone-coloured plates amid the void-black denoting veteran status. They escorted a matt-black cuboid the height of a Space Marine. Gravitic impellers moved it on a shimmering cushion of energy and a silver box was mounted on one face.

‘What is that?’ he voxed, the chant forgotten.

‘I do not know,’ Mathias replied first.

‘The Dreadwing’s arsenal holds relics of the Unification Wars,’ Derwyn said. Karael did not like the evasion in the synthesised voice. ‘The Emperor granted the Six Hosts of Angels many unique weapons later forbidden to the other Legions.’

‘Remember Praefectus Derwyn was a warrior once,’ Tanis said, his humour strained by the enemy’s repeating chant. ‘He was not always a battle-servitor sheathed in ceramite.’

The other Interemptors laughed and Karael’s lips pressed into a thin smile. It was an apt description, but both displays of mirth were equally forced.

‘Knowledge is not your burden, postulant,’ Annael said, his helm inclined in greeting. The Terminators strode past, as did the Interemptor veterans. Karael fell in with Derwyn’s squad, forming an honour guard to the cuboid. ‘Nor yours, Brother-Interemptors. Remember that knowledge accompanies experience as if it were its shadow.’

He knew the axiom as well as any son of Caliban. It was from The Verbatim, the primer text for knights of the Order and Dark Angels aspirants. That lesson stressed skills and knowledge be passed to knights when experience determined they were ready, a trait that found its mirror in the First Legion’s secret hierarchies and hidden orders.

‘Aye, lord,’ Karael said, sullen but respectful. Derwyn and Annael were the two officers assigned to determine his worthiness for the Dreadwing. ‘Forgive my impertinence.’

The Dreadwing stalked over the rubble. Ferrocrete chunks threaded with twisted lengths of rebar crumbled beneath their tread. They strode over bodies, several still alive, ignoring the grasping fingers that reached for them. Karael put a bolt in one woman reaching for a shot-cannon, the action instinctive rather than considered.

‘You showed none. It is simply a lesson worthy of remembrance,’ Annael said. ‘I see there was some opposition to our landing, Praefectus. Nothing too troubling?’

Derwyn’s synthesised laughter wheezed across the vox.

‘No, lord,’ he grated. ‘Some Cthonian citizens wanted to express their dissatisfaction. We noted their complaints before they were illuminated.’

They wheeled right, following the Terminators east towards the industrial sector. The device turned with them, clumsy in its movements. Shadows darted through the ruins. Karael signed Mathias. The Interemptor nodded and passed word along. It was not hard to smell an ambush, but if the enemy were setting one, the Dreadwing would be ready.

‘I expected nothing less, brother,’ Annael said. ‘It is precisely why I requested your squad for this duty.’

Karael’s aural receptors caught snippets of shouted orders and bolter fire. They were of little interest. The device was another matter. It carried no biological or radiological indicators, or warnings of any kind, only a steel box with a small screen and several haptic controls. Anonymity gave it an ominous air.

‘And what is our duty, lord?’ Derwyn clicked.

‘Castigation, my brother,’ Annael answered. Eagerness bled into his voice and Karael smiled reactively. Ignoring the concern tugging at the back of his mind, he clutched his bolter tighter. They turned again, marching along a street lined with plastek habs. The shadows vanished, all signs of ambush with them. ‘We escort the device to a manufactorum on the sub-level, prime it, and withdraw for extraction. Today we are angels of vengeance, striking a blow the Warmaster and his mongrel-blooded sons will never forget.’

‘Is that why we are on a separate channel, lord?’ Mathias asked.

‘This duty must be secret from all not assigned to it, hence this channel’s vermilion-grade chimeric encryptions,’ Annael said. Karael suppressed his surprise. Such encryptions were rarely used, and the idea of clandestine assignments kept from other Dreadwing was an equal surprise. ‘Secrecy is essential to success. Priority transmissions will penetrate, but we are not to respond. We are also to ignore any distress calls received.’

‘What of the Fists, lord?’ Derwyn asked.

‘Fleet augurs detected no Seventh Legion transmissions,’ Annael said, too quickly for Karael’s comfort. ‘They must have fallen, along with any who stood beside them.’

They continued their march in silence, through streets crowded with cheap plastek habs and tenements supplanting older structures of quarried stone. Their weapons covered every potential firing angle and the Dark Angels turned wherever Annael gestured with his Terranic greatsword. The Naufragia wheeled behind him like a murmuration.

After twenty-five minutes, they entered the fringes of an industrial sector. Tenements and habs ceded to sheet-metal refineries and storehouses. They passed between rusted drums and open containers, noting each one had been picked clean of resources and materiel. As a Dark Angel, Karael had walked on dead worlds and through cities long fallen to ruin. None of them made him uneasy. Cthonia did.

They found the sub-level access scant minutes later.

It was a simple set of stone steps, framed by ferrocrete walls, worn smooth by age. Smashed lumen-strips and glow-globes meant the steps vanished into the darkness. Even the enhanced visual spectrums of his battleplate could not pierce the gloom.

‘Is this the only sub-level access?’

‘No, Praefectus.’ Annael led the way, thudding into the gloom at the head of his Terminators. Their cowl-lumens bobbed in the dark. ‘It is isolated, emerges a kilometre from our target and its lack of technology reduces potential for enemy interference.’

Karael followed Derwyn and his Interemptors into the dark. The walls were pitted and cracked, veined by moss. The legionaries’ heavy tread was a black echo that dogged their descent. The low hum of the device’s gravitic impellers grew strained on the difficult terrain, reducing their pace almost to a shuffle. They walked dark, dank and cramped tunnels for over ten minutes, doubling back three times to find accesses wide enough for the Terminators.

He breathed quiet relief when they emerged onto a walkway carved into the rock face at the edge of a cavern. Refineries, storehouses and shanty towns dominated the sub-level, the buildings over thirty metres beneath him. He spotted the manufactorum immediately, an ingot of black iron and a clear precursor to the belching monstrosities the Mechanicum now erected. A small hangar adjoined the warehouse space and metal shacks clung to its side like rusted barnacles. Annael was right. It was barely more than a kilometre away.

The Dark Angels continued their slow descent. Karael’s eyes and iron sights flicked between windows thick with cobwebs and narrow defiles cut between buildings. Static teased him with fragmented sentences and mismatched words. They were too deep to hear their brothers on the surface and it could easily be enemy vox traffic.

The beating of his hearts quickened and his battleplate squirted fresh stimulants into his blood. They were entirely too exposed on the walkway. The last few minutes of their descent ticked by with Karael’s blood thundering in his ears, alert to the possibility of an ambush, his breath infused with the rich chemical taste of adrenaline. They reached the bottom unharmed.

Then the Sons of Horus opened fire.

Two Interemptors died in the first salvo, their torsos riddled with detonations. Reavers launched themselves from a refinery’s dusty skeleton, chainblades snarling and pistols flaring. Another Interemptor fell, his head vanishing in a crimson fountain, and bolts spiralled fractures through a Naufragia’s breastplate.

‘Close ranks!’ Annael bellowed. Tendrils of disruptive energy wreathed his Terran blade and power fist. The Naufragia withdrew into a circle and fired, coring two Reavers with darts of blue-white plasma. ‘They must not reach the device.’

He sent three bolts into a Reaver chieftain with Horus’ planed features. Blood and bone sprayed across his brothers. Bolter fire cut down two Sons wielding glittering powerblades. Plasma speared Mathias, forcing him to his knees. His life signs flared. Karael loaded a fresh magazine. He suspected Mathias had lost a lung. The Dark Angel fired on the Reaver wielding the plasma pistol. Bolts split ceramite and blood burst from the traitor’s ruptured chest. Static teased a Legiones Astartes voice and slices of words that meant nothing.

Karael’s pauldron cracked under a sustained pistol barrage, pain knifing into his shoulder. His bolts cut through the air, punching fist-sized craters in a Reaver wielding a crackling power fist, its knuckles slick with blood. Karael drew his chainsword, parrying a strike towards his primary heart, and launched a feint that merged into a thrust. The vox crackled live, the faint voice dripping chained frustration from a Necromundan accent.

‘…of the Seventh Legion. We are under attack and require reinforcement. All surviving Imperial forces, this is Vatrenus of…’

‘The Seventh?’ Mathias groaned, picking himself up. ‘They live?’

The Reaver blocked and launched a counter-attack at Karael’s throat. He sidestepped the blow, his blade punching through the Reaver’s gorget seal. Blood and diced meat spat from the whirring teeth. He dragged the blade free, raising it to block a decapitating strike from a second Reaver. He deflected a blistering series of blows, feinting and launching counter-ripostes, exercising his duellist’s patience until the Son overextended himself. He drove the blade into the earth, cutting the Reaver from nape to groin.

‘They must be desperate,’ Tanis said, his words punctuated by the hiss of vented gases. ‘I fought three compliances alongside them. Not once did they request aid.’

‘Forget the Seventh!’ Annael roared, his power fist obliterating a Reaver’s torso. A Terminator fell, hacked apart by Cthonian blades. ‘Protect the device. Shield it with your lives, brothers, ere the vortex consumes us all.’

The bottom dropped from Karael’s mind.

Bolts snapped from the mouth of his weapon, cutting a Reaver’s torso and head apart. His blade decapitated a Son that oozed viscous black liquid from his knuckles. He could not reconcile what he had heard with reality. Vortex weapons were the most dangerously potent archeotech ever conceived by humankind. They did not destroy through explosive yield or bio-engineered toxicity. They ripped reality open, dissolving everything in raw warp matter.

Karael’s distraction nearly cost him his life.

A bareheaded Reaver lunged, his chainaxe’s whirring teeth devouring the empty air towards Karael’s neck. Karael parried the blow and smashed his chainsword’s knuckle-guard into the Son’s nose and jaw. Bone snapped and blood spurted. The Reaver’s off-hand flashed silver, carving a smoking rent in Karael’s breastplate. Pain lanced through him and blood wept from the tear. Breath sawed between his teeth and sweat rimed the inside of his gorget seal and dappled his close-cropped beard. He threw the Son of Horus back.

Around him, Reavers threw themselves at the Dark Angels with renewed zeal, their numbers slowly whittled down. The Sons of Horus fought like cornered Great Beasts, twice as cunning and three times as dangerous. He was surprised there were so few. The other Dark Angels must have had them distracted.

As the Reaver came at him again, desperation and fury seeded the warrior’s eyes with burst blood vessels. He swung at Karael’s neck with his combat blade. Karael blocked the strike with his forearm, ignoring the thunderclap of ceramite, the hot kiss and crisp of flesh against a disruptor field. The Reaver’s axe swung down to cut diagonally across his body. Karael blocked with his chainsword and headbutted the Reaver, pulling his blade down to cut the traitor from clavicle to pelvis.

He looked around. The other Sons were dead, joined by nine Interemptors and three Naufragia. There was no Apothecary to extract their progenoids, nor could they vox for one. Shame burned in his chest. The fallen would die twice today.

‘We move,’ Annael said, regrouping his Terminators. The other Dreadwing limped into formation, blood weeping from ragged holes in their battleplate. ‘We cannot linger, or assume they are alone.’

‘What of the Fists, lord? And our brothers, their legacy…’ Karael began.

‘Their legacy will be the Emperor’s vengeance against the traitors,’ Annael said flatly. ‘We can do nothing for the Fists. The mission takes priority over all other concerns.’

Karael glanced at the vortex weapon, disgust blooming.

‘We cannot dishonour their sacrifice.’

‘Your vacillation does that well enough.’

Karael recoiled as if slapped. Words fell from his tongue.

He joined his brothers, unable to shake the thoughts of the dishonour inflicted on their fallen, certain that his hesitation had been noted. The Dark Angels advanced through the cramped warren of underhive streets and shanties. They crashed through shacks that barred them from quicker routes, shielding the vortex weapon with their armoured bodies. Karael still struggled to believe it was a vortex weapon, its ominous air worsened by context and the knowledge that it would be used against friend and foe.

They were First Legion. The Dark Angels. They did not turn upon allies or slay indiscriminately. That was the province of Mortarion’s ghoulish footsloggers and Perturabo’s sour ditch-diggers. It was not the behaviour of a knight of Caliban.

Karael’s silence turned sullen as Vatrenus repeated his dour plea. It cycled through the vox less than a kilometre from the manufactorum hangar, punctuated by the rolling crash of bolters and the fizzle of lasweapons. The Dreadwing brothers seemed unaffected, their focus on shielding the dread device from falling debris and traitor fire. The enemy was chanting again, audible over Vatrenus’ vox-link. Nausea threaded itself through the acidic burn of Karael’s burgeoning shame and anger.

‘The Emperor is dead!’ they jeered. ‘Dead. Dead. Dead!’

Karael matched his brothers’ increased pace. Their silence became a taut thing of simmering fury and strangled grief, their desire to punish the traitors a physical sensation that pressed against his skin. They had failed to reach Terra in time to protect the Emperor; instead they could only punish Horus’ followers for their betrayal. Karael refused to believe He was dead, but the sheer powerlessness was utterly alien. It made his skin crawl. The cold, dry air stank of desperate fury, with Vatrenus’ voice and the traitors’ chant shadowing every step.

‘We cannot ignore them, brothers.’ The words slipped through gaps in his gritted teeth and breached the thin crease of his lips. He was grateful to be on a private channel. ‘It would shame the entire Legion if it were known we had abandoned our cousins.’

The Dark Angels jogged across the perimeter, under empty promethium towers and hunched loading cranes. They crashed into the hangar through a corrugated steel door sized for ground haulers, ignoring the dusty signs for logisticae offices, assembly floors and workers’ quarters stencilled on the wall. Grey light spilled from the retractable roof overhead, a narrow cleft in the cavern ceiling visible through the aperture.

‘We can do nothing for them,’ Mathias said, sweeping one corner of the hangar clear. Steel containers, sternum-high on the legionaries, had been emptied and left to rust. ‘We are knight-castigators, the Lion’s sanction. Leave heroics to the Deathwing.’

‘The cause is paramount,’ Tanis agreed. The hangar secure, the Interemptors fell back into small knots while Annael and the Naufragia attended to the device. The lieutenant keyed a sequence on the haptic controls. ‘It matters more than our brothers’ lives, and ours.’

‘What of our honour?’

‘It matters more than notions of honour and our brothers’ perceptions,’ Tanis continued. ‘Honour is a sacrifice all Dreadwing make. We sully our hands and blacken our souls with dishonour in the Lion’s service and the Emperor’s name, performing the duties that others cannot, or will not.’

Karael disabled the private vox.

‘Lieutenant, may I speak?’

‘Freely,’ he said, still hunched over the control panel. His scowl was plain in his voice, but Karael was determined. He would not abandon his brothers.

‘Should we not alter our extraction plan, or issue a warning to the Seventh? There are no reinforcements, and our orders must permit some latitude.’

‘We are angels of darkness and vengeance, postulant, not mercy.’

‘The Fists served with loyalty and honour.’ Karael leashed the anger threatening in his voice. ‘They do not deserve the fate you hand them.’

‘Casualties of war.’ Annael raised himself to his full height in a snarl of strained armour servos. ‘Regrettable but necessary.’

‘They are our brothers,’ he said. Guilt worked his tongue and vocal cords like a maestro. It was unbearably pathetic. ‘Honour and brotherhood define the Legiones Astartes, a definition the Warmaster’s perfidy should make more important, not less. If we leave the Imperial Fists to die, are we any better than he?’

‘Your idealism is commendable, brother,’ Annael said, a muted vox-click sealing them in a private channel. Begrudging respect crept into his tone. ‘Those qualities should define the Legiones Astartes, but these are unkind times when they cannot interfere with our duty. Perhaps there will be a day when the Dark Angels can once more define themselves in this way, but that is not today. The decision is made. We will not aid the Fists.’

Annael closed the channel before he could reply.

For one laughable moment Karael thought he had scored a point. He looked to Derwyn and the eight surviving Interemptors of Squad Derwyn. They showed no concern for the Imperial Fists, or their hand in the deaths of loyal kin. They repaired damaged plates with armour cement and checked their weapons. Perhaps it was as Tanis said. Perhaps it was a familiar burden. Their behaviour possessed hallmarks of orthodoxy.

Shame was a Nemochian serpent that thrashed free of every bond he placed on it. He would be culpable for loyalist deaths through inaction, a violation of his oath as a Legiones Astartes warrior, but warning them would violate his oath to the Dreadwing.

He racked his brain for a way to satisfy both oaths. Neither could be twisted to suit the other. Karael was a Dark Angel, not a Word Bearer, to whom oaths were malleable and inconstant. His skull throbbed, a dull pulsing pain, but resolution remained elusive. Vatrenus broadcast again and Karael disengaged his vox’s security protocols.

Postulancy be damned.

‘Vatrenus. Do not hold position. Devastation comes. Withdraw.’

He closed the link and re-engaged the security protocols. Annael’s seething breaths were the bass rumbles of a Calibanite lion. His voice was threateningly low, his anger cold and smouldering, more insidious than a raging inferno. Karael met the glowering eye-lenses, ready to accept the consequences.

‘What did you just do?’

‘I kept my oath as a legionary,’ he said evenly. ‘I could not allow the Fists to die.’

‘Your oath as a legionary,’ Annael repeated, tasting the words. Incredulity stained his tone when he repeated them again, spicing them with a bleak, bitter humour.

‘I am oathed to this mission, but not yet to the Dreadwing. My Astartes oath is made to the Emperor, and I could not violate it through my inaction.’

‘The Imperial Fists failed the Emperor,’ Annael snarled, his facade of discipline and devotion to the mission falling away. ‘If He is dead, it is because Dorn and his dull-witted Legion failed to protect Him. These warriors could not even cleanse Cthonia. They may be complicit by their failure, and they should die because of it.’

‘You knew they were here,’ Karael said. It was not a question.

‘It matters not what I knew,’ Annael spat. ‘Knowledge is a burden borne by those capable of bearing it. Ignorance is a shield for others to cower behind.’

Karael said nothing. There was nothing to say.

‘We must now defend this location and await extraction,’ he said, turning to his officers. ‘Barachiel, use this installation’s vox-relay to implement the alternate extraction. Tharahel, form these containers into a viable defensive line. Derwyn, your squad and the remnant of Dumah’s will form our outer line.’

His brothers were quiet as they carried out the instructions. Anger bled from them, but there was also a grim relish for the blood yet to be spilled. The Dark Angels settled into firing positions, and Karael hoped the Imperial Fists had received his message.

Annael’s parting words rang in his ears.

‘If you have any honour, you will embrace the penitent’s fate.’

The Sons of Horus attacked twenty minutes later.

They stormed forwards in a wave of ceramite and muzzle flashes. Assault Marines sprang forward on screaming jets. Reavers were a black knot howling tribalistic war cries and revving their chainblades. A Contemptor strode beside them, the ground trembling with its every step. One arm sported a long-barrelled assault cannon, the other a quartet of wickedly curved talons. Karael’s lip curled. He drew aim on a Reaver and fired. The traitor’s skull detonated in fronds of blood and bone.

Return fire clanged against containers and split ceramite. Karael staggered backwards, his breastplate cracked. Pain lanced through him. He dismissed the red alert-runes, wounds already clotting. Bolts punched through a Son’s gorget. The traitor stumbled, blood spurting between armoured fingers. Bolts and plasma ripped through the enemy ranks, and armoured bodies pitched forwards, a storm of scattered limbs and ruptured plate. Karael shifted his fire, a mass-reactive burst blowing a heretic’s head apart.

The Contemptor opened fire.

Three Interemptors toppled backwards, their signum-runes fading from his retinal feed. Another collapsed, one arm severed by bolter fire. It dripped sparks and stringy tissue, flapping uselessly at his side. He fired his plasma burner one-handed until a bolt cratered his faceplate. Rad grenades exploded amongst the Sons, shards biting through their ceramite. Several stumbled, their pace slowing as their enhanced physiques struggled against the irradiated metals. The Assault Marines bounded again.

The Dark Angels split their fire.

Plasma tore into the Dreadnought’s chassis, ripping sea-green boulders free. The air flashed sky-blue and tasted of charred ozone. The Contemptor dragged one leg forward in a grinding limp. Bolts ripped from its assault cannon, eviscerating two Interemptors. A stray burst struck Mathias’ plasma incinerator coils. Karael’s brother vanished in a ball of blue-white plasma like a miniature sun. Karael reloaded and gunned down two more traitors. His weapon was unable to harm the Dreadnought, but not its brothers.

Bolts tore an Assault Marine from the skies, scattering his squad mates like starlings fleeing a hawk. Something punched through Karael’s pauldron. Pain stretched into his chest and shoulder from torn flesh and muscles. He fired on a Son wielding a bulky autocannon, the detonations splintering the traitor’s pauldron and breastplate. Blood wept from the cracks. The autocannon chugged to life, reducing an Interemptor to charred scraps. Karael loosed a second burst, ripping out the warrior’s eyes and cheek. The Son howled, wet flaps hanging from his face, his eye a gelatinous ruin. Karael’s iron sights stilled on his throat.

A sea-green comet barrelled into him.

Karael rolled over, pushing himself back to his feet. He ducked under an Assault Marine’s wild decapitating strike, cutting him apart with point-blank bolter fire. A second Assault Marine lunged at him, slicing towards his chest. Karael avoided it, ducking and whirling to stay clear of the gnashing teeth as strike melded with strike. He had no clean shot, nor could he draw his chainblade. His bolter ammunition was low, the last magazine almost dry.

The Son was on him, slicing at his neck. Karael blocked with his forearm. Chain-teeth bit through his gauntlet, shearing away flesh and muscle. Karael snarled and headbutted the traitor. The Assault Marine lurched forward, blood streaming from his broken nose, Horus’ name on his lips. Karael shot him in the face.

The Sons of Horus breached the forward line.

‘Withdraw!’ Derwyn bellowed. Lubricant leaked down his shoulder. His breastplate was ceramite shards and sparking fibre-bundles, blood sizzling on his sword’s disruptor field. It drew a smoking arc across an Assault Marine’s chest. ‘Back to the second line.’

Karael dropped his bolter and snatched a bolt pistol from the fallen Assault Marine. He drew his chainblade and fired the pistol in controlled bursts. Entrails spilled from a Son’s ruptured stomach. Explosive shots vaporised his skull.

Tanis was beside him, firing his plasma burner. It cored a Reaver and two more Sons. The Interemptor was limping, wheezing, his ruined chest sheeting crimson. An Assault Marine vanished in a cloud of ionised particles. Tanis’ signum-rune disappeared, his body shredded by the assault cannon. Three more life-runes faded from Karael’s display, cut down by his mistake as much as the war machine.

‘Wyrmfyre!’ Annael shouted.

Karael recognised the Calibanite battle-cant and quickened his pace, wrestling down the gut-wrenching guilt of leaving his brothers’ bodies behind. Grenades spun over his head. Karael reduced the brightness on his retinal feed to shield his eyes.

Phosphex flared white-green. The crawling, acidic fire splashed the advancing Sons, dissolving armour and devouring living tissue. Traitors collapsed, screaming, immolated inside their battleplate. The smell of roasted flesh lodged in his nostrils.

The Contemptor strode through the fire.

Assault Marines catapulted themselves over it, chainblades angled to strike. They breached the second line before Karael even reached it. He squeezed a burst from his bolt pistol, staggering one and felling another. Through the corner of his eye, he watched Annael and the Naufragia lumber into contact with the Contemptor. Karael could do nothing, fighting with every ounce of strength and discipline to reach the embattled second line.

That was their keep.

His chainsword was a snarling blur chased by arterial spray. It bit through flesh and ceramite. Its teeth whickered away in defensive strikes, defanging enemy chainblades as often as itself. Karael thrust and parried, lunged and feinted, employing every iota of skill learned under the Aldurukh drillmasters. The dead formed the Dark Angels’ rampart.

Karael decapitated a legionary in mismatched sea-green and sunburst-yellow battleplate. He deflected clumsy strikes from a Son wracked by facial tics, disembowelling him. They were half-legionaries, hothoused over a period of months and trained in hypnomatic rigs. He slew another with a counter-riposte that punched through his back-mounted power plant.

The Dark Angels’ circle shrank inwards. Karael fought his way to Derwyn’s side, dismembering three more newborns. He thrust for a Son’s stomach, the blow easily turned aside by the warrior’s two-handed power axe. Teeth whickered free and the Son took a step back to face both Dark Angels. His armour was festooned with tribal fetishes and totems, helms from the sons of three Legions clanking against his thighs.

Karael shot an overeager newborn through the throat, swaying aside to avoid the dying warrior. Two more died. He turned, barely in time to parry a wide, curving swing aimed at his throat. Karael counter-attacked, slicing for the traitor’s throat and arms. The Son parried with axe-blade and haft, seeking to overbalance him or lull him into false security. Karael smiled at such an amateur tactic, relishing the prospect of dispatching another foe. A block melded into a sudden overhead swing that caught him completely off guard. Karael cursed and parried, but not well enough. The axe-blade bit deep into his thigh-meat. Pain screamed along his nerves as the blade was wrenched free.

Red sheeted his armour.

Pain-nullifiers flooded Karael’s system, the second’s distraction enough for a lightning strike to his faceplate, fracturing it and breaking the bone underneath. He collapsed, tasting blood. The Son towered over him, axe raised. Karael blocked a downward strike. The second split his chainsword. He met the red eye-lenses, determined to show no fear.

Derwyn was there.

The Praefectus drove the Son back with a devastating series of strikes. He fought like the Lion himself, another Interemptor at his side. The Praefectus’ warplate was matted with gore, much of it his own. His bladework was masterful, every cut, block and thrust timed to perfection. Karael pushed himself to his feet; the unpleasant sensation of bones reknitting set his face itching. He fired into the traitors, spots still blurring his vision.

The Praefectus fell, cut almost in two.

The other Interemptor dragged him back, a salvaged power weapon deflecting the Son’s vicious counter-attack. Bolts punched into the Interemptor. Karael lent his fire to Annael and the surviving Naufragia, cutting down a handful of Sons with converging bolter and plasma fire. The traitors charged the surviving Dark Angels, jeering and firing their bolters from the hip. The axe-wielding Son advanced with grim relish.

Spotlights illuminated them.

A Stormbird’s gimbal-turrets ripped the advancing Sons apart. It hovered on pinions of plasmic fire, spinning on its axis to bring its weapons to bear. Hatches slid open and Dark Angels unloaded their bolters on full-automatic into the traitors, scything them down.

‘Everyone aboard!’ Annael roared. His eyes bored into Karael. ‘Including you.’

Karael hobbled over to the Stormbird, the crevice in his leg making him last to the landing site. A brother hauled him into the gunship. The turbines screamed and the airframe groaned, the pilot pushing into a near-vertical climb to escape the blast radius. Karael lowered himself into a restraint throne, taking in his surviving brothers.

Annael’s skull was torn open and one arm ended at the elbow. Derwyn was a mess of ruptured organs and augmetics. The two Naufragia were broken reflections of their former invincibility and the last Interemptor vomited blood beside Derwyn. Tanis was gone. So was Mathias. His squad brothers were dead, along with too many others. A piercing feedback whine drew his attention to the bulkhead-mounted vid-screen.

A lightning-wreathed sphere of wretched light expanded greasily along the skin of reality. It glutted itself on flesh, bone, blood and ceramite. Buildings were torn down and pulled into the vortex, its whetstone shriek piercing in his ears. The smudged suggestions of leering maws and raking claws pressed against the migrainous miasma like water on plastek. It collapsed moments later, a perfect half-sphere carved into the bedrock.

Karael severed his vox-link as the gunship continued its climb. There was no word of the Imperial Fists, nor confirmation his warning had been received.

Karael hung his head and said nothing.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels The Solar War, Mortis, Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection, Incarnation and Divination for The Horusian Wars and three tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe Award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies, as well as Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams and Agent of the Throne: Ashes and Oaths. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

Michael F Haspil is the author of the award-winning novel Graveyard Shift and numerous short stories. He is an avid tabletop gamer and podcaster. He was born in the 1900s and lives in beautiful Colorado with his wife and two pit bulls.

Gary Kloster is a writer, a stay-at-home father, a librarian and a martial artist – sometimes all in the same day, seldom all at the same time. He lives among the corn in the American Midwest and his short fiction can be found in Analog, Apex, Clarkesworld and others. For Black Library, he has written the Necromunda novella Spark of Revolution, and a number of short stories.

Nicholas Wolf is an author, artist and occasional musician. He’s written science fiction for several publications, and his work includes the Warhammer 40,000 short stories ‘Reborn’ and ‘Negavolt’ for Black Library. He lives and works in Arizona, with his family.

Noah Van Nguyen is a writer of speculative fiction who lives and works in Vietnam. After a stint in the military, he tried his hand at translating, copywriting and teaching English. He intends to keep writing fiction as long as the coffee keeps flowing, which his wife has promised is never-ending. This has so far turned out to be true and the matter is now pending Inquisitorial investigation. His work for Black Library includes the short stories ‘Vova’s Climb’ and ‘No Third Chance’.

Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The First Wall, Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including Indomitus, Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah and the Last Chancers series, including the most recent title The Last Chancers: Armageddon Saint. He also wrote the Rise of the Ynnari novels Ghost Warrior and Wild Rider, the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles omnibus The Sundering, and, for Age of Sigmar, The Red Feast. In 2017, Gav won the David Gemmell Legend Award for his novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Chris Forrester lives and works in his home town of Wolverhampton. A lifelong science-fiction fanatic, he has been an ardent fan of Warhammer 40,000 for over half that time. His work for Black Library includes the short stories ‘Disgraced’, ‘Legacy of Posul’ and ‘Postulent’.

An extract from The Solar War.

On the first of Primus the sirens rang across Terra.

On the myriad worlds conquered and ruled by the Imperium of Man, they talked of year divisions, of time sliced into a thousand equal slivers. First division, second division, third, and so on, without variation or character, until the weight of counting reached a thousand, and one year tipped over into the next. On worlds of endless night or blinding days, a year was the same. In an empire spanning a galaxy, anything else would have been meaningless.

0000014.M31 was how surviving records would mark the first moment of that day, stamped and corrected for temporal accuracy, standardised and stripped of any meaning. But, here, on the world whose night and day and seasons had given mankind its concept of time, the old counting still meant something and so did the moment that one year died and another was born: the Feast of Two Faces, the Day of New Light, the Renewal – on and on went its names. But for longer than memory it had been the first of Primus, firstborn of the three hundred and sixty-five days that would follow, a day of hope and new beginnings.

The turning of that year began with snow on the northern battlements of the Imperial Palace, where three brother demigods watched the night skies above. It began with the dawn light and icy chill reaching into a tower-top chamber and stirring the painted cards dealt by a man who was older than any knew. It began with the sirens calling out, one at first, high on the Palace spires, before the cry was picked up by others, on and on across the turning globe. The sound echoed through the mountain-sized space ports and rasped from vox-horns in the deep strata of the Atlantean Hives.

On and on it went, stilling the hands of people as they ate and worked. They looked up. In caves beneath the earth, and hive vaults, and under the smog drifts, they looked up. Of those that could see the sky, a few thought they could make out new stars amongst the firmament and froze at the promise of each pinprick of light: a promise of fire and ash and an age of loss. And with the sound of sirens, fear spread, unnamed but still spoken.

‘He is here,’ they said.

Prison ship Aeacus, Uranus high orbit

‘I understand you have a story…’ she said. The wolf stood before her, the fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. ‘A particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

The wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.

‘Which story?’

‘Horus killing the Emperor.’

Mersadie Oliton woke from the memory-dream with sweat on her face. She breathed, and pulled the blanket over her from where it had slipped onto the floor. The air was cool and dank in the cell, scented with the tang of air that had been exhaled too much. She blinked for a second. Something was different. She reached out a hand and touched the metal wall. Moisture clung to the rivets and rust scabs. The thrum of the ship’s engines had gone. Wherever they were, they were stationary in the void.

She let her hand drop and let out a breath. The tatters of the memory-dream still clung to her eyelids. She focused, trying to pull back the threads of the dream even as they slid into darkness.

‘I must remember…’ she said to herself.

‘The prisoner will stand and face the wall.’ The voice boomed out of the speaker set above the cell door.

She stood instinctively. She wore a grey jumpsuit, worn and faded. She put her hands on the wall, fingers splayed. The door unlocked with a clang, and footsteps sounded on the grated floor. The guard would be one just like the rest: crimson-clad and silver-masked, the humanity in its voice concealed by vox distortion. All the gaolers were the same, as constant as the ticking of a clock that never struck the hour.

Small spaces, locked doors, questions and suspicions – such had been her world for the seven years since she had come back to the Solar System. That was the price for what she had seen, for what she remembered. She had been a remembrancer, one of the thousands of artists, writers and scholars sent out to witness the Great Crusade as it brought the light of reason to a reunited humanity. That had been her purpose: to see, to remember. Like many clear purposes and shining futures, it had not worked out that way.

She heard the footsteps stop behind her, and knew the guard would be placing a bowl of water and a fresh jumpsuit on the floor.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, hearing the question come from her mouth before she could stop it.

Silence.

She waited. There would not be a punishment for her asking, no beatings, no withdrawal of food or humiliation – that was not how this imprisonment worked. The punishment was silence. She had no doubt that other, more visceral methods were used on other prisoners – she had heard the screams. But for her there had only been silence. Seven years of silence. They did not need to ask her questions, after all. They had taken the memory spools out of her skull, and those recordings would have told them everything they wanted and more.

‘We are still in the void, aren’t we,’ she said, still facing the wall. ‘The engine vibrations have stopped, you see. No way of missing it if you have spent any time on ships… I spent time on a warship once. You never lose the sense of it.’ She paused, waiting for a response, even if it was just the sound of retreating footsteps and the door shutting.

Silence again.

That was strange. She had tried talking to guards in the early years, and their response had been to leave her without reply. After a while, that had felt worse than if they had struck a whip across her back. They had never beaten her, though, or even touched her. Even when they opened her skull to remove the memory spools, they had sedated her, as though that made the violation that followed more acceptable.

She supposed that such small mercies had to do with Qruze or Loken. The former Luna Wolves had watched over her as much as they could. But that had still left her a prisoner of the greatest and darkest prison in the Imperium. Loken had said that he would free her, but she had refused. Even while it pained her, she understood why she had to remain locked up. How could she not? After all, had she not seen the true face of the enemy? Four years of life on the Vengeful Spirit amongst the Sons of Horus, in the shadow of their father, who now had set the galaxy alight with civil war. What other reward could there be for remembering those days? A galaxy shrunk to silence and plasteel walls, with only dreams and memories to speak to her.

She had begun to dream memories after a few months, dreams of her home on Terra, of the sunlight shattering across the edge of the Arcus orbital plate, her mother laughing and calling after her as she ran through the hydro-gardens. And she had dreamed of her time amongst the Luna Wolves, and the Sons of Horus, of people now long dead. She had asked for parchment and pen, but none had been given to her. She had gone back to the old games her mind-nurse had taught her, ways of tucking memories away when she woke from sleep, ways of remembering the past even as it fled into the distance. In the silence, she had found that memories and dreams were all she had, all she was.

‘Are we still somewhere in the Solar System?’ she asked, and twitched her neck to look behind her. Why was she still talking? But then why had the guard not left? ‘The ship doesn’t feel like it’s preparing for translation. Where are we?’

They had come for her in her cell on the Nameless Fortress three nights ago. They had loaded her into a box barely big enough to stand upright in. She had felt the box judder and sway as machines had lifted it and her. They had let her out into this cell, and she had recognised the vibration of a void-ship under power. It had been comforting at first, but her dreams had not been, and now the silence of this moment was feeling stranger with each elongating second.

‘Why was I taken away from the fortress?’ she asked. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Where we all wish we could go, Mistress Oliton,’ said Garviel Loken. She whirled, and the end of her cell was gone and a wolf was rising from a pool of dark water beneath the moon. Its eyes were black spheres, and its bared-teeth grin was wide as it spoke. ‘You are going home.’

In the dark of her cell, Mersadie Oliton woke to silence and lay still, waiting for the dream to fade or for herself to wake again.

Strike Frigate Lachrymae, Trans-Plutonian Gulf

The first ship of the onslaught died as it breached the veil of reality. Streams of plasma reached out from gun platforms. White fire smashed into the ship’s prow. Lightning and glowing ectoplasm streamed behind its hull. Macro shells detonated amongst the molten wounds already cut into its skin. Turrets and spires sheared from its bulk. Towers broke from its spine. It kept coming even as its bows were torn apart. The burning wreck struck the first of the mines scattered across the dark. Explosions burst around it. The front portion of the ship sheared from the back. Prow and gun decks hinged down. Atmosphere vented from the exposed interior. Debris scattered, burning for an eye-blink before the flames ate the air trapped in the wreckage.

‘Ship kill,’ called a sensor adept from across the bridge of the Lachrymae.

Sigismund watched the intruder’s death as it spread across the pict screens above the command dais. He was armoured, his sword chained to his wrist and resting point down on the deck at his feet. He did not blink or move as the dying ship tumbled across his sight. In the still depths of his mind he heard the words that had brought him to this place and time.

‘You must choose where to stand. By the words of your duty, or by your father’s side at the end.’

Around him the command crew was silent. Eyes fixed on instruments and screens. This was the beginning of the moment they had all known would end the years of waiting. Some, perhaps, had thought or hoped that it would never come. But here it was, marked with fire.

I chose, Keeler, he thought, and in his mind, he heard again the words that Dorn had spoken in judgement of that choice.

‘You will continue in rank and position as you have, and you will never speak to any other of this. The Legion and the Imperium will not know of my judgement. Your duty will be to never let your weakness taint those who have more strength and honour than you.’

‘As you will, father.’

‘I am not your father!’ roared Dorn, his anger suddenly filling the air, his face swallowed by dusk shadows. ‘You are not my son,’ he said quietly. ‘And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.’

‘I chose,’ he whispered to himself, ‘and here I stand at the end.’

The fire from the dead warship spread across the displays.

‘If they come at us like this, the slaughter will barely be worth the sweat,’ growled Fafnir Rann.

‘They will not give us that luxury,’ replied Boreas from further back on the platform. Sigismund did not look around at where the holo-projections of the Assault captain or his lieutenant hovered at his shoulders. Each of them stood on the command deck of one of the Lachrymae’s sister ships.

Rann wore void-hardened Mark III armour, with reinforcing studs bonded to his shins and left shoulder. The scars of battles fought here, at the edge of the system, ran beneath the fresh yellow lacquer. His tall boarding shield hung in his right hand, the twin axes mag-locked to its back echoed in the heraldry painted on the shield’s face. Sigismund imagined he could see the warped smile on Rann’s face as he turned to Boreas and shrugged.

The holo-image of the First Lieutenant of the Templars did not move. Unhelmed, his face was a single twisted scar, and if there was any emotion beyond cold fury behind his eyes, Sigismund could not see it. Boreas’ sword of office stood almost as tall as he did, its guard the cross of the Templars, its blade etched with the names of the dead.

‘All ships, stand by,’ said Sigismund softly, and heard the orders ripple out.

The vibration in the deck rose in pitch. The dull ache that had been building in his skull for the last hours was sharpening. He noticed one of the human deck crew shiver and wipe a hand across a bead of blood forming in her nose.

‘Hold to our oaths and the strength of our purpose,’ he called.

Whispers buzzed at the edge of his thoughts, razor tips scratching over metal. They had needed to sedate every astropath in the fleet two hours before, as a wave of psychic pressure had sent them babbling and screaming. It had become more intense with every passing moment, and it presaged one thing: it was the bow wave of a truly vast armada coming through the warp, bearing down on the Solar System like a storm front. Horus and the traitors were coming.

‘Etheric surge detected!’ shouted a sensor officer.

‘Here it comes,’ said Rann, and brought his fist to his chest. ‘Honour and death.’

‘For the primarch and Terra,’ said Boreas.

‘For our oaths,’ said Sigismund. The images of his two brothers blinked out.

He reached down and pulled his own helm from his belt and locked it in place over his head. ‘May my strength be equal to this moment,’ he said to himself as the helm display lit in his eyes. The data of the battle sphere overlaid his sight.

The Plutonian Gulf glittered with weapon platforms, torpedo shoals and mine drifts. Together they formed a great web, tens of thousands of kilometres deep, stretching from the very edge of night to the orbits of Pluto itself. Ships glinted amongst the defences: fast gun-sloops and monitor ships that were little more than engines and weaponry. They had been built in the orbital forges of Luna, Jupiter and Uranus and dragged to the edge of the sun’s light. Alongside them lay the fleet of the First Sphere: hundreds of warships, all in motion. And beyond the warships, the moons of Pluto waited. Studded with weapons and hollow with tunnels, each was a fortress that could have stood against a fleet.

The sheet of stars erupted with lightning. Rents opened in the vacuum. Nauseating colours and dazzling light poured out as ship after ship surged from nothing into being. Tens, and then hundreds. The sensor servitors in the Lachrymae twitched and gabbled as targets multiplied faster than they could vocalise updates.

Mines detonated, explosions leaping from one to another in chains that stretched across the dark. Gun platforms opened up. Macro shells, rockets and plasma struck metal and stone, bored in and exploded. Ships died even as they tasted reality, armour stripped by fire, guts spilled into the dark. In the first ten seconds, over a hundred vessels burned to wreckage. Most had been former warships of the Imperial Army, crewed by humans who had given their oath to Horus and been rewarded with the honour of being the first to draw their blades in this battle. They died for that honour, burning too in the ruin of their ships, hulls shredded around them.

But they kept coming.

Ship after ship, tearing reality like flags waving in front of a gun-line. The first Legiones Astartes warship surfaced from the warp. It was named the Erinyes, and it was a bombardment galleon of the IV Legion: a five-kilometre-long hull wrapped around a trio of nova cannon barrels. She loosed all three shots as the void kissed her skin. Each nova cannon shell was the size of a Battle Titan, its core filled with unstable plasma. They had no target, but they needed none. They ran straight into the heart of the defences and exploded with the force and light of a star’s birth. Gun platforms vanished. Mines lit off in spheres of red flame. Fire poured from the defences as more ships rammed past the debris of their dead kin.

The light of the blaze flooded through the Lachrymae’s screens and viewports. Sigismund’s helm display dimmed.

‘Engage,’ he said, and the Lachrymae leapt forwards. Twenty strike cruisers and fast destroyers followed in tight formation. Lance fire speared out from them, slicing into ships as they cut across the front of the enemy fleet. Plumes of ghost-light and ectoplasm stretched like arms through the dark as more ships punched through from the warp.

A backwash of etheric lightning struck the Imperial Fists cruiser Solar Son. It spun, its hull cracking and crumpling as the laws of reality went into flux. The Lachrymae and its sisters did not pause but plunged on. They had one purpose in this moment: to kill as many of the enemy as possible while they clawed from the warp onto the shore of reality. For the moment, the Imperial Fists’ prey was vulnerable, and the First Sphere fleet were predators.

The Lachrymae’s guns found the skin of the gun-barge Fire Oath before it could light its void shields. Macro shells punched through gun decks and exploded. Munitions cooked off in loading hoists. The Fire Oath’s hull bulged, then burst. Building-sized pieces of hull scythed out, caught the flank of a battle cruiser as it emerged from the warp and tore its command castle from its back. The warp breach it had emerged from pulsed and swallowed the wreckage.

‘Hold,’ called Sigismund, his voice passing through the ships of his command via crackling vox-link. ‘For our oaths, we hold true.’

The Lachrymae sliced on while its mortal crew screamed as ghosts and nightmares flooded their sight. Reality in the battle sphere was now little more than tattered scraps blowing in the night. The Lachrymae rolled, her guns finding enemy after enemy. But for each one that died, another three came from the warp.

Deadfall torpedoes set in the void triggered and speared forwards. Carcasses of ships split and burned. Pluto’s fortress-moons found their range to the first of the invaders and spoke. Newly lit void shields flashed as they collapsed. Volleys answered. The reserve fleets holding close to the moons powered forwards and began to kill and die. The light of battle swelled, blurring with the glow of thousands of warp transitions, until which side was firing and which was burning was lost in a rippling blaze tens of thousands of kilometres across. Hours later, the light of that fire would glimmer in the night above the battlements of the Imperial Palace as the sirens called and alarums rang to tell that Horus had, at last, brought his war to the birth system of humanity.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

Cthonia’s Reckoning © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. Cthonia’s Reckoning, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-604-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.